Tiny Screws
Tiny Screws
The world around us runs of often invisible systems, routines, efforts, and components.
Each of these things is known and understood and legible to someone (or in some cases, something: an organization of people, or maybe a synthetic system that keeps things ticking along) but many of them will remain invisible to us throughout our lives because they just work, they’re part of the background scaffolding of civilization, and that’s both beautiful and alarming (like walking across a bridge spanning a huge chasm, realizing mere bolts and cables and the good judgement of engineers and builders hang between us and a long fall to our deaths—it’s impressive! But also: oh no).
I was thinking about this dynamic—how a shocking amount of what makes the world tick is invisible to us and will probably remain so—while watching a short video about how an ultra-tiny watch screw is made.
At very large or very small scales, even things that are insignificantly cheap and easy to make become a labor-intensive, skill-necessitating task. And it’s interesting to see what goes into the creation of something like this, on this micro-level.
Here’s the video:
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