ON TIMELESS TOOLS

SUM OF THE PARTS

This picture from the late 1800s made me do a double-take today.  Here's the Gizmodo post that goes with it:

Sometimes, things as mundane as tool kits can look like great works of art.

This piano repair box, perfected by Henry Studley, does a great job of fixing up instruments, but it's careful placement of knicknacks also makes it beautiful.

Studley was an organ and piano maker, as well as a carpenter and mason, who worked for the Smith Organ Co. at the turn of the 20th century.

His tool chest was loaned by his grandson to an exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History, until a private collector bought it.

When closed, it's dimensions are roughly 39-inches x 20-inches x 9-inches. When opened though, it widens out to 40 x 40. [acriacao]

What struck me about the picture was how much it looked like a printed circuit board, which of course has been a critical component of so many tools less than a century later.

Comments

[Alex Tolley]

Michael,
I think that is an "artistic" similarity based on concept on minimum area packing resulting in lots of closely, parallel aligned units. In the piano tools case, alignment is due to the simplicity and strength of right-angle joints, while in the PCB it is probably due to the rectangular nature of the components. The functionality and use of the components is obviously very different in the two cases.

The natural world is a lot more flexible and minimum surface area packing make take on a different layout.