Back in the 1940’s, 1950’s and somewhat into the 1960’s it seemed like we had a lot more garage tinkerers who were always inventing and working on projects of one kind or another. I stumble across guys here and there who are still actively tinkering but not to the degree it was done in earlier years. ( possibly confirmation bias on my part)
If my observation is correct what would the counterparts of these same men be doing today?One area: High-tech discoverers. A subset of whom are hackers.
ETA:
… men, and women, right?
There are still tinkerers, but I think they’ve moved on from purely mechanical projects to electronic or electro-mechanical. Plus, the cost and complexity of tools may have moved these people out of their garages and into more cooperative arrangements. Check out something like Make magazine, or the makerspace movement in general. There’s a place near me with tools I could barely imagine a use for; plasma cutters, computer-controlling milling, 3D printing, etc. It seems to be thriving.
As a tinkerer myself this is where my thinking has been going, I find myself more in need of collaberations as well, which always means compromise of course.
I started to include the word women in my post but this particular type of things seems to be heavily male dominated, but there again maybe not so much today.
The fact that there don’t seem to be as many folks doing it makes me feel a little less bad about my incompetence with mechanical things. The best I can do is stick a couple of Crazy Ikes together. When I took an aptitude test in high school I scored in the bottom three percent in mechanical reasoning, and almost as bad in spatial relations. As long as there are people like me folks who can repair things will always have a job.
Some of us are still around.
I have a neighbor like this, we call him the “Hillbilly Genius.” He can fix or rig up anything with zip ties or a couple of basic hand tools and he is the neighborhood “fixer” of things.
I guess he still does what those guys did back in the 1950s. Rig up a home made dog door. Build a shed, with shelves and electricity, for $50.00 in materials. Build a large deck out of recycled materials, then design and build a roof for it. Did a road-side fix when my brakes went out 30 miles from home on a Friday evening. (The aforementioned were all done for me by the Hillbilly Genius.)
He keeps his and his wife’s two 30-year-old vehicles running, he fixed another neighbor’s leaking porch roof, another neighbor’s leaky basement and he also put up shutters for her, fixed another friend’s ailing weed whacker last week…The guy should be a damn national treasure.
In less-prosperous social strata, guys (and, OK to be PC, women, although I have never met one) still do what they did in the 50s and 60s. Fix shit, build shit, help people out. People with higher incomes hire all that stuff out and don’t appreciate the skill that goes into it.
Every now and then I will stop by an estatae sale and wind up out in the garage admiring the little machines and jigs the old guy put together, a few other guys my age might be browsing with me admiring his work and ingenuity, it saddens me a bit that his own kids will seldom show any interest. I have tons of little gadgets myself that I doubt my kids could even figure out what they are for. I tend to dismantle and trash things when they have served there purpose or give them away to someone who might use them. I really would like to hook up with some old like minded farts like myself in my golden years. We could take one last shot at some big project that will change mankind forever.
Going row-by-row thru my counterparts in the cube-farm (this is a literal answer btw):
-watching other men play games with balls
-arguing over how other men play games with balls
-unknown
-IR photography (pretty amazing)
-unknown (work… there when I arrive, there when I leave. Not sure if he ever goes home)
-discussing how best to watch other men play games on various small devices
-pretending those other men are on your team, and playing another pretend team
-arguing over which pretend men on the pretend team won the make-believe game
-building amazing furniture in a woodworking shop (outlier co-worker)
-restoring old boat, exploring abandoned settlements, hunting, fishing, flying (me)
-arguing with wife (separating, maybe divorced)
-kids, kids, kids, kids, kids (family man only, no outside interests AFAIK)
These are the ones near me. Very few men seem to build or tinker. I know one woman in the building who rebuilds cars and builds/rebuilds engines for them.
If the OP (or anyone else) is interested, a link to an earlier discussion on declining hobbyists.
Maybe there’s a kid in your neighborhood whose curiosity your gadgets will pique. If you shared with him or her, you might be able to hand down some of your advancements to the next generation. You’re in Torrance, so there are plenty of people near you. I wonder how easy it is to find a neighborhood kid who’d be interested in hanging out with you? Or, perhaps, find a local high school or junior high shop teacher (metal shop, wood shop – do schools even offer such classes these days? When I was a kid back east in the 1960s it was called Industrial Arts) and see if they have any after school programs that you could assist with.
It’d be a shame if your knowledge, technological advancements, and experience all went POOF and be gone when you depart this world.
If you were able to hand something down a generation or two, who knows? Maybe in a few years that kid might develop and market something remarkable, and we’ll hear of their new machine, and that kid-now-adult would say, “At the heart of my whosama-whatsit is this ingenious doo-hickey that I call the HoneyBadgerDC doo-hickey, after my old friend the creator of the doo-hickey.”
The typical suburbanite wasn’t as far removed from the farm back then. There’s always something to fix on a farm and with the industrial revolution they had more complicated things to fix. That combination of manufacturing and farm practicality is what I think lead to a certain need for mechanical intelligence.
The problem is things became more and more disposable.
At one time it was worth getting a tv of VCR repaired. But now if something goes wrong with your most prized possession Apple doesn’t even want you to try to change the battery.
Our cleverness has also worked against us in a way. We have a history of looking for doing things in the quick and easy way. It results in crafting cheap junk.
I love a cleaver trick but not more then craftsmanship, and that takes time and practice. It’s a lot of fun using some skill and experiment. But I think there is too much emphasis on immediate gratification.
I grew up on a farm, but I just didn’t have it. It would have taken some intense work for me to learn, and probably innovative teaching methods. The best comparison might be teaching someone with dyslexia he to read; can certainly done, but not without a lot of patience. My dad and two older brothers are all very mechanically inclined, so there wasn’t big motivation for the time investment it would have taken for me to learn. Now I’m thankful I can afford to pay others to fix things for me.
This is a lot of the reason you find fewer tinkerers. Much of the tinkering was repairs. That was the training ground to develop the skills, and also the fertile ground for creating new gizmos. Now even when people do their own repairs they’re probably just going to order the part and do the work to replace it. Few are going to try to fabricate something.
On the other hand, there is an entire do-it-yourself industry that has people buying kits and prefab parts. It may not be the same as the tinkering of yesteryear, but I think it shows people still have a desire to create and construct and develop the skills.
I donno. It still exists to some degree. My Wife would not be surprised to see me rig up something. I often have to, living in the sticks.
A few years ago soldered a bunch of copper together to see if I could harness solar energy with the pipes and some 5 gallon buckets of water. Very limited results, but it was interesting.
Also made a pretty cool spare tire mounted ski rack for the back of my Wife’s SUV. Copper pipe again. Worked OK. Now long gone.
For fun, rigged a bow/drill not to long ago to see if I could make a fire with it.
Yesterday I had put the plow on my truck to get ready for winter. Needed to pick the plow up with a sling with my tractor/loader to a more even piece of ground. Cut the top of my head in the process. Doesn’t seem like it was a weekend if I don’t end up bleeding from somewhere. :smack:
Took our DVD player apart and fixed it. Often, just taking something apart and putting it back together will fix it. In that case, it was a dust issue.
Aquadementia … I Respectfully disagree with your conclusion. It’s not so much about instant gratification. It’s about technological inaccessibility.
When I was about 9 I disassembled a standard Westclox electric alarm clock. One with a synchronous motor, three analog hands for the time, and one more hand to set the approximate time of alarming. And an electromechanical buzzer for a noisemaker. This was about 1967 and the clock was made in the USA in about 1964. Much of it was not designed to be disassembled, with bent-over tabs in slots & such to hold the chassis together. But it *was *disassemble-able down to the last physical component.
I learned a lot fiddling with the gears, counting teeth, etc., then put it back together. It didn’t work the first time, but after 3 or 4 reassemblies it worked fine. I learned even more about clocks & disassembly / reassembly procedures from that.
Fast forward to 1982. I’m an undergrad computer science student taking some hardware EE courses as well. I decide to disassemble my new battery-powered digital clock radio to see what I can learn.
What I learned was it consisted of a few discrete resistors and surface mount capacitors and a half-dozen ICs, plus several discrete 7-segment LED display modules. I could get data sheets for some of the components from the Engineering School’s library, but others were proprietary. I could learn zero about any software/firmware it may have had.
Other than opening the case, there was nothing I could disassemble non-destructively, and none of the details by which it worked could be discerned by me, somebody with ostensibly enough education to at least take a good stab at it. I couldn’t even locate anything that appeared to be the time base oscillator; I had to assume it was something akin to a 555, using a tuned RC circuit rather than exciting a crystal. But that was an informed guess, not knowledge derived from first principals and observations of the machine.
Fast forward to 2014. My alarm clock is an app in my smartphone. I personally have the tools and technical wherewithal to write and distribute just such an app. But I’m a lot more rare than one in a thousand in being so equipped.
And even I have negligible insight into disassembling or repairing the phone, its OS, or the general app infrastructure. Sure, I can make arm-waving & point you to online documentation, but that’s no better than my 1967 self saying “it has an electric motor that turns gears that turn hands.” All true, but trivially true & utterly lacking in insight or learning. And it’s certainly not actionable knowledge; it’s far too high-level for that.
As to this particular app, I could probably break through the OS security and obtain the machine code image, then run it through a software disassembler / decompiler to learn the intricate details of how it functions. But by design I couldn’t then tinker with it. I could certainly copy the recovered sorta-source code, make changes, and build & install that on my test phone.
But to anyone with fewer tools or experience than folks me, the alarm clock app is a magical black box. Not only does it have “no user serviceable parts inside”, but it is as resistant to probing as 2001’s TMA-1. All the tools and all the knowledge the typical person can bring to bear on it simply bounce off. It reveals it’s designed UI and that’s it. It may as well be an inert lump of steel for all you’ll learn fiddling with it.
And THAT is what’s most different about 2014 versus 1965.
Just for kicks I bought a copy of Popular Science from 1965 (it had a picture of my first car on the cover). Yes, it had lots of “how-to” articles ranging from automotive to electrical to home repairs. But the part that surprised me and that I didn’t remember was the page after page of ads for manuals and training classes. They ranged from learning plumbing, electrical, accounting, sales, marketing, radio and TV repair, etc. I don’t know if back then people were more into self-improvement, or perhaps this was the equivalent of finding information that we can now so easily do on the Internet. It seems like lots of them had VA benefits as a payment option as well.
Like LSLGuy, I’ve tried to disassemble some older electronics just to see how they work. One example is a remote wireless thermometer. You’d think that it’d be easy enough to reverse engineer the data being sent and try to capture the signal, but finding details of such proprietary electronics is quite difficult (if you know how to do this, let me know!). However, lots of Android and Arduino is “open source” and provides a different entry point into hobbyists that are similar to what was being done 50 years ago.
There’s a distressing number of people here who think that some combination of modern technology and damn-lazy-kids-these-days have killed off the noble hobby of taking things apart and putting them back together. Nothing could be further from the truth.
The mechanical tinkerers are now electronics/software tinkerers. They contribute to open-source code repositories, build Arduino-powered robots, and muck about with 3D printers.
The crafting movement is big right now. Take a look at craftster.org where the motto is DIYODS: Do it Your Own Damned Self. Ok, no inventions that will save the world or create a fortune, just making or repairing and repurposing things for myself. In my house, I’ve got six lamps that I’ve rewired and painted, two chairs I’ve reupholstered, some ugly put it together yourself furniture that I covered in oil cloth, and some utility wire shelving that I adapted to bookshelves that don’t allow the books to slip through the wires or fall out the back. I’ve got dozens of things I’ve sewn as well. Some might say sewing doesn’t count, but if you’ve ever tried to set a collar or sleeves, you’ll know that you have to have some spatial aptitude or you’ll look like you got dressed in front of a fun house mirror.
Hopefully, Mangetout won’t mind me mentioning his website Atomic Shrimp.
He has documented a bunch of different projects, including a seaworthy boat built from scratch and a cider press. Worth checking out.