MechaniCards Linked to Prehistoric Times

The following is the writing of a dear friend of mine.  A couple years ago, I'd asked him for a little something I might be able to use in my marketing efforts.  What I got was perhaps the preface to a hilarious and fantastic novel. I hope you find it as amusing as I did.  Thank you, Terry!

                                                          "Brad Shop"    by Terry List

I want to tell you about a man who makes toys so complicated it took him fifty six years before he came up with the first one. These aren’t for (most) children. And the grown-up people who buy them might not know that they are looking for answers to our most nagging questions.

Such as:  why didn’t the Romans jump start the industrial revolution? Was there a moment when it looked like China might take the prize and drag the rest of the world with it? Just what is it that makes us different from smart savvy creatures like dogs and monkeys?  Can a mechanical confection sprung from the cog-nizant ferment of a single man’s mind actually take you to places like that?

I think so. So I set out to put down some of the reasons why I think Brad Litwin’s Mechanicard creations are not only a whole lot of fun, but an awful good way to get up to speed with some of the coolest social and philosophical theories of our age.

Ah, let’s start at the very beginning. Not the beginning of life on earth, but that moment when humans stood up to predators and other competitors by using tools and started to out-breed the cave bear and other woolly apparitions. But could they make a car?

It wasn’t like our caveman ancestors had a chance. I mean, if Gnuh and Gurrogge wandered into the valley of loosely assorted wheels and sprogs and cogs and other fine things, would they have driven back to camp?

Nuh-uh. No way. And you and I know they didn’t have any such luck. The roundest thing they had was probably an eyeball, the straightest thing, an arrow. The closest thing to a machine was the bow or maybe a log for pushing over a rock. They might have squeezed clay into a bowl, they might have woven a basket. And that was it.

Today we are surrounded by the tools of invention. We have at our disposal more chemistry, more artifice, more equipment in our kitchens than an entire kingdom might muster in the year 1000.

And what do we do with it? We use it, break it, throw it out. We didn’t make it, we rarely assembled it, we rarely repair it. Where does it come from? Half way around the world ten thousand blue-jacketed workers are fiercely assembling more of the same. Did they design it?

No. The design and functionality is an assemblage of industrial magic that is handed down from one generation of engineers to the next, toss in a few new bits, also crafted by specialists.

Production history of one single piece of kitchen equipment is a chain forged of dozens of highly specialized operations, each its own domain, each domain largely opaque to the previous and the succeeding domains.

The glass-makers could not run the casting factory, the plastics people could not draw the wires their plastic coats, the graphics people don’t understand the physics of the cutting blades, the rubber makers don’t comprehend the chip makers, and on and on. Somehow that wilderness is tamed and arrives in your kitchen as a functioning blender.

Point is, nobody, not the worker bees, not the smart-arsed technicians and designers, not the managers, the money people, the stockholders…can individually produce or even describe the blender in it entirely.

And yet, there it is. Gleaming or glowing with the latest exciting curves, ready to chop and puree till fickle fashion has its day and it joins the tide of the broken and discarded.

You may not agree, but to me this is very little different from our caveman ancestors as consumers. They went forth, and here’s a world of stuff they didn’t make and didn’t comprehend but had some use for. The rabbit ran away, but might be felled with a stick. The stone was round but might be cracked into shards, the shards to trim sticks and prepare the game for a meal. Trees and bushes grew thickly along the river, and the sun might dry a pounded mix of meat and berries.

Dimly they might begin to shape the world to provide more of what they needed. Often they took the best, and left faster, skinnier rabbits, tougher weedier grains, the sour or bitter berries. They could wipe out the game, and all the tasty berry bushes mature and die leaving no young plants. Because they ate, and possibly cooked, all the berries.

Some groups would slowly acquire an advantage, and gradually they would come to save the best seed and put it back.

With organized agriculture and livestock production a new set of problems arose. Soils might be depleted of essential nutrients, or though careless irrigation become saturated with toxic salts. Populations would rise on a wave of excess production and then crash like a wave breaking on a rocky shore.

And today, if you have the means, and many do in so-called developed lands….a vast tide of goods both mechanical and edible comes washing up to and through our doors, and then right back out again as waste. The system that makes this possible is as complex as a rain forest, as tricky as rain in the great plains, as unknowable as the weather or any other naturally occurring ecosystem.

Settlers didn’t know how to make a thresher, may never have seen a factory, but where there was knowledge of better gear, demand followed. There has almost never been a time when American European “settlers” were truly self-sufficient in the way that stone-age people were. Iron was essential to pioneer life, and was not obtained by smacking two stones into fragments. Somewhere a proto-industrial dragon belched smoke and disgorged a stream of liquid iron. In the years following the Civil war pioneer farmers began to acquire dozens of tools and machines made in factories and workshops, tools that increased productivity, and which gave them a livelihood in a cash economy.

Then, as today, you rode the wave of innovation or found yourself swept into a backwater and be rendered obsolete.

That wave is made out of the choices of a majority of people in this country, and is part of a continuous whole stretching round the globe. To be out of the loop is to be poor or living in the twilight of sustenance agriculture.

It is by our tools that we live or die. We have so much re-shaped the flow of food and energy that we now have ninety percent more people than might be fed with pre-industrial agriculture. To go back is to see a worse chaos, the chaos of disintegration, of feudalism, of rampant tribalism. Do not think that with things could get so very local that chickens and cabbages would fly into the cooking pots of all households. To go back is to return to scarcity, and war would roost on the threshold of every home.

You may disagree, you may think that without all this industrial complication we might live simpler, and somehow, better lives. Though I do not doubt that we can, and must, do better with our use of resources, for those of you who favor a return to pre-industrial conditions, I suggest you try a few fourteen-hour days in the sun with a hoe, and, oh, that man down the row with a whip is not there to sing about “Earth Day.”

I unabashedly, and sincerely, celebrate the machine. I celebrate the wheel, the lever, the bow and arrow, I celebrate the shovel and the pick, I exalt at the passage of a car or a train and am dazzled by the improbable splendor of a jet aircraft cutting its way across the sky.

These things devour ancient energy, they are stuffed with the pampered, harried, over-educated, possibly neurotic and faddish stakeholders in this big gamble we are taking.

What if you could read about flying and then, because you are now an expert, running headlong off a cliff expecting that the wings we imagined will be the wings that take us across the void.

Think of a myth. There are many such. At the root of Greek/Roman storytelling we have a 

guy who goes up some higher place and steals fire, brings it back, and soon he owns a big house and the shiniest car.

Here’s another one, a bit more basic: Once upon a time the Great Spirit gave a human a stone.  “What do I do with this?” Asked the woman, holding the stone.

“You may do nothing with it, and remain as you are. Or crack it open and fasten the best part on the end of a stout stick and see what happens when you meet a bear.”

The human decided to try it, and killed the bear occupying another cave, and took the cave as shelter. A new human group was thereby formed.

Back came the Spirit, and said, “Good job. Since I can’t sell you rocks, I’d like you to try copper for a spear. This will require you to organize, because copper comes from two valleys over and those people don’t like you. Good luck.”

Our heroes scratched their heads at that. The one copper spearhead the Spirit gave them was a magnificent hunting tool. Anyone could sense that in an instant. Then one of their number pointed out that the enemy always snuck in to grab red clay. “Why just let them just take it? We should demand copper in exchange.”

Trade resulted, and the idea of trade brought new seeds and new farming techniques. A little while later, in the city that arose near the copper smelters, in a room on the third story of a structure very near the collective granary run by religious specialists, a man was visited again by the Great Spirit.  “You people have done splendidly. Now suppose I took away your copper, your grain, your irrigation, your plows, your horses, your cattle, your sheep, your grapes…”

The man was understandably worried. “Great Spirit, why would you do this?”

“It’s a thought experiment.” Chuckled the Spirit. “Don’t be concerned, I’m here to give you another gift.”

The man said to himself, now we’re talking.

The Spirit held out a bottle, a nice blue color, corked and sealed with red wax.

The man took the bottle. “What is this, oh Great Spirit?”

“Hmm. It’s medicine.”

“But we aren’t sick.”

“I’m taking away the potter’s wheel.”

“I suppose it can’t hurt.” The man opened the bottle and took a sip. “Not bad. Thanks.” He rubbed his gut. “What happens now?”

“Oh, just take it again next week.”

“That’s it?”

“Well, for now. Here’s the recipe. You’ll need to build a factory, and some of the ingredients will require cutting down trees and some of this comes from the ocean and then you’ll be wanting to put deep holes in the ground to get coal cause the temperatures for processing one of the machines you’ll need to make a special boiler are really rather high.”

“Oh.” Said the man, looking at the bottle. “So what if I don’t take it?”

The Spirit gave the man a look:  just how dumb are you really.

The man, being both practical and enterprising, went forth and built a factory and very soon had the whole town taking the new meds. Someone discovered that coal was great for improving iron-making, and so when the Spirit returned with an improved formula that happened to be less tasty and actually quite bitter, all the people were ready to swallow it down.

The Spirit then revealed the secrets of electricity and steam power, and now people were taking stronger medication and though a certain weakness now took hold, the machines they built were able to do most of manual labor so they didn’t much notice and didn’t much mind the changes to their bodies or the exhaustion they felt.

Things went on like this until one day, the Spirit stops by the apartment of a woman for a chat.  “Hello, creator.” Said the woman from her couch, directing her robot to bring refreshment.

“Hello, human.” Replied the Spirit. “I see you don’t walk much.”

“No need. And anyway, we have to take our medicine.”

“True.” Said the Spirit. “But it appears I may have miscalculated. That medicine is killing you. You aren’t having many children, and what children there are sit immobilized with their brains wired into a computer. It’s not what I pictured. I’m thinking of taking it all back.”

“No!” Exclaimed the woman, making an effort and sitting up.

“But I don’t have to. An asteroid will very shortly wipe you out and maybe this time it’ll be for the birds.”

Gulp.

Another way of looking at the problem is to imagine going in a cave and getting to one of the furthest, tightest passages miles into a thousand twists and turns. It evolves that you forgot to turn off the stove when you left home, but when you turn around, you realize you’ve made no note of the way in and it will take you, well, forever to get out.

So you say, heck with it, and push on in the cave even though you know your house is going to burn down.  Finally after a long, long slog through mud and slime you break through into a vast chamber filled with…

There’s no answer to what. And if we stop taking our medication, we do die, or most of us die, and at best we fall back into small violent groups of peculiar shared ignorance.

As for the way ahead, like warriors raising their spears to  exalt the God who made them strong enough for combat and its consequence of death and dismemberment, we exalt the odd fortune that put us on this wave of creation, and hope for a view of what’s to come from the trembling top of the wave. And because the turbulence represents a complete re-ordering of what people want, this distant view is fuzzy.

Celebrate the machine, celebrate humanity, we tool users, shapers of the ekos (sic), our house the planet and the universe the Earth spins though.

Behold the miniature hand-held hand-crafted worlds fashioned by one of our kind, the inventor and (speaking as a fan and a friend) mechanical genius and innovator, Bradley Litwin.  

Let me tell you a bit about him. Bradley started with a fever. He didn’t finish high school, and no college lays claim to that sentimental challenge of trading those student loans for annual giving. It was the fever, getting in the way.

Brad went straight from his very last formal moment in education to the life he was apparently destined to have. On to Vermont, making guitars and being with the woman who was to become his life partner and wife, Ellen, also an artist, in clay.  

Back to Philadelphia and an astonishing array of little careers, any one of which took him to places any artist with or without a degree would be proud to feature on a resume. His “Dragon Machine,” which I saw operate numerous times and still don’t properly understand even though all the gears and cogs are patently visible, sat on display at the Franklin Institute for a good while. He returns to the stolid marble block of Franklin to join an exclusive club for musings on their collective history, family history in a manner of speaking.

It is people like Brad who have brought us to this precarious position on the wave of discovery and innovation. He and his peers go to the Institute to gaze at the marvels of the past, to decode decipher and possible repair the clocks, automata (old fashioned robots) and other glorious surviving intricacies.

No one can say why some of us are given the talent to gather what is given and take it apart and put it back together in a totally new form. Be aware that this select group rises above those who would easily be recognized for achievement in math and physical sciences. Yes, you have to have that, to begin with.

In Bradley, this fever kept him jumping from one hot place to another. It was as though an eye was opening inside his mind and was going to keep trying till it could see the world clearly.

I saw some of the guitars he made, I enjoyed hanging out in his basement workshop, and made good use of what I learned by example and instruction. I saw him creating non-tactile animations as the power of personal computers started to explode. I heard his tales of being interviewed by men who would as likely hire the product of a four year engineering school but they took Brad on because he could do it.

He talked about the equations he’d need to shape the optics for one of his devices. You don’t need to ask me if I admire his drive, his talent, his creativity. I do. And this is what compels me to tell the story of the place he has finally arrived.

Mechanicards.com. He snagged the cool name, but it’s not like there was a big race or anything. I’m not even sure that if he were to start his little outfit right now today that the name would not be available. Maybe it would.

That’s what they mean by, “there’s always room at the top.” You’ve heard that, does this mean we’ll all fit in?  No, it’s quite another thing, I’ve discovered. If ten groups as fertile and breathtakingly new as the Beatles were to suddenly erupt out of suburban garages worldwide, what would happen to them?

You and I both know that’s unlikely. So, even if that did happen, it wouldn’t be for long. And some of the good stuff would get promoted later, but promoted it would be. There is room for the very best in almost anything. And there is usually so little of it.

Brad snagged Mechanicards as website and trademark and now I’m going to tell you what they are, and a little bit about what they aren’t.

Let’s begin by taking a trip back to ancient Greece, that place both venerated and plundered by the Romans, who are our cultural and technical ancestors in almost everything about Western civilization. At this moment, however, the Romans were engaged in the struggle with Carthage that would decide who got to have the Greeks as ancestors, and who would be erased from history. Rome was a city of wood, but Greece was decorated with marble temples and extensive religious sites like Delphi with its collection of historical relicts dating back centuries. It wasn’t ancient Egypt, but came close.

In some small Greek shop, not a whole lot different from where Brad’s mind makes its home in the shattered reaches of old industrial Philadelphia, was a man, probably a man, but we don’t know.  It might have been a female slave. Whoever, or whomever it was, they created an astrological and astronomical geared marvel out of brass that was taken on board a ship and then conveniently sunk until we contemporaries got our hands on it.

The knowledge and skill that went into this mechanical calculating calendar could have made the inventor one of the prime movers of the industrial revolution. Instead, he died, and his device was hidden. Even after it was found it was hidden, the works mostly caught in a clump of encrusted corrosion and sand and what all.

X-rays revealed more, and today the Greek museum of antiquities holds proof that at almost any time after organized civilized urban  society sprang up in various spots around the globe, almost any time after about five thousand years ago, we humans might have lit the match to the industrial, technological and population explosion we are living through.

In his “Anti-Antikythera,” Brad has captured the mystery of how this incredible relic both taunts and captivates the imagination. As with others in his series of Mechanicard creations, this device fits in a flat box barely larger than two compact disks in their boxes. And like most of the others, it is activated by the movement of a very simple tool, a miniature crank that you release from a temporary paper sling and then gently insert into the square blank hole waiting in the corner.

You have doubtlessly seen things that do not reveal themselves on the first glance. An old hose half hidden by weeds…could it be a snake? A brick wall in your kitchen, one night, by candlelight you see a face staring out at you. A trick of the uneven surface and the flickering light animates what is no more than an illusion….That car in the land ahead of you that is steadily matching your pace until it just suddenly swells and you discover that it was the last car on a long line of stalled cars and it hadn’t been moving at all…

Not only do you not see all of the moving parts of Brad’s little creation, but I suspect that even if you did, you might arrive at the same conclusion. You see it move, you experience astonishment than an arrangement of wood and pressed pulp and wires and gears meticulously packed into a wafer could do that…and you have no idea what’s actually happening there.

So you maybe put it down, and mull its cultural ancestor, the green corroded lump in a Museum, and then you pick it up again and again you turn the tiny crank and again you wonder what the heck you are looking at and how did he think of that, anyway.

Have you ever seen a dog confounded by one of our many mechanical interventions? You would be hard pressed to find a single cat who could use her clawed paws to open a doorknob. But a dog has a sense of wonder, and a dog eventually might acquire a feeling of the rightness or wrongness of things in the human world.

Try this at home, if you have an easy relationship with your dog or cat. Put on a mask and say “hello” to your cat. It is possible that they will react as if you weren’t wearing a mask. A dog, however, is likely to start barking at you. They know it’s you, but there’s something wrong and they want you to know.

Now meet the hound who barked at wheels. A narrow street, narrow sidewalk with plenty of foot traffic. Our dog placidly takes it all in, a sniff here, a snuffle there, mostly nose on paws, relaxed at the feet of their master.  But when I politely walked my bike past, Fido gets up and starts barking. I wonder what it is about me that sets him off, until I realize that it’s the bike, more, it’s the wheels. Fido is completely torn up by the sight of that thing twisting around and never changing. The owner shrugged. “He’s got a thing with wheels.”

You might guess that poor pups got hit by a bike or some wheeled object, and the sight of another one gets their hackles up. But I’m going with another take. The owner didn’t say, “He hates bikes cause they hit him.” No, Fido had “a thing” with bikes.  So do I, now that I think of it. And it’s the wheel part that gets me. Do you realize that in the natural world, before homo sapient creativity hit the planet, there was virtually nothing that was really round?

Some fruits come close. Eyeballs roll. A few mineral  concretions weather out of bedrock and can be very nearly spherical. The cross section of the trunk of a tree may be like a tire, in fact was later used for wheels.

But in order to have a thing that rotates around a pivot…you need to actually conceive that such a thing is possible. And, oh, there is exactly one example of living tissue performing a continuous, endless, rotary motion, and this is found at the microscopic level around the spinning lashing “tail” or flagellum of a single celled organism. One, practically invisible spinning thing.

You might object, “but wind and water often spin, as in whirlpools and tornadoes.” Yeah, but these are specialized manifestations of wave phenomena. You would be hard pressed to harness a dust devil on the axle of a carriage.

Our hound possibly saw something profound and inexplicable in the rotation of my bike tire. I am going to ask here and now what it would take for you to come up with the wheel and some of its common applications. Let’s say you’ve been raised in a utopia where all your needs are met, and stuff just appears in front of you when you ask.

Now you are supposed to take a pile of strangely shaped junk and assemble it into a means for getting a fat rock from point “A” to point “B” in under an hour. Okay, so none of the junk is actually round. You need to shape it, with one of the other objects. We’ve cheated and thrown in an axe. That probably would get used pretty quick. It looks like a very large front tooth, an incisor.

Are you getting me here? It would take a freaking genius to put it together in maybe under a year. The time it took for humans to come up with the wheel…

One line of speculation is that the wagon wheel descends, in technological evolution, from….the potter’s wheel.  This may sound crazy until you realize how the potter’s wheel probably came about. Yes, it spins and spins with no beginning and no end. But the first pots were made out of coils of clay pinched and pressed into a vessel.

So our ancient clay-worker would start finding it easy to turn the pot around as she worked on it. Putting it on a rock, or chunk of wood, add some slippery dried leaves and it’s easy to twist without damaging the pot as it grows under your hands. Next thing, a stone or board with a lump in the middle might spin more easily.

Following this, and when that moment in cultural space said “we want perfectly round pots,” you’d have a poser. How to get that base to spin around and around while you mold the clay in more and more perfect radial symmetry? And once you made that happen, the kick-spin base would be next and somebody would start “throwing“ pots while the clay spun around under their guiding hands.

What else could be done with this invention? Why, it might be adapted for a grain mill. For irrigation. And….a couple of identical round disks might then be fixed to an axle and there’s how you take that stone a great distance without needing to drag or skid it.

Think you could figure all that out?

What’s crazy is that one single glimpse of a carriage moving down a rutted road, one glimpse by even a modestly mechanically susceptible person, and it’s done.  You see it, you get it, and it may be hard to build, but eventually you’ll have one, too.

Well, I am at least modestly mechanically capable and I can look right at the guts of one of Bradley’s mechanical marvels and it’s going to take me hours, maybe days, to finally comprehend the three-dee, non-electronic, perfectly visible gears and stuff that’s right there in front of my face. I don’t think I’m a stupid person, but here in the middle of us all is a guy who takes the most ordinary things…ordinary only because we humans spent thousands of years coming up with them….he takes them and goes to some other place.

You can go there, too, at Mechanicards.com. See some of the other wonders he has crafted, and make your own guess about what he might make next. And if the spirit moves you, send him a line or two on one of the many social media sites hosting this and that about his work. Change the world? Maybe you will. Seeking inspiration? Here it is!

Terry List is a freelance writer, naturalist, geologist, smithy, explorer, and no one knows what all, living in Philadelphia, PA.