Whenever I’m in a used book shop or a thrift store, I like to look for old science or engineering texts. This one, found at a vintage shop in Mill Valley, CA this past weekend, is especially exciting for me!
Not only is it full of beautiful drafting and hand drawings, it was published in 1919 (106 years ago!!), and seems to be a crowdsourced1 collection of mechanical “hacks” – EASY WAYS TO DO HARD THINGS. There are more dozens of ideas in here over about 200 pages, ranging from a DIY tractor to replacement glasses frames made of cardboard to a portable baseball backstop to complete instructions for building a small boat. Many list the name and location of the person who submitted the idea, like J. C. Marsh in Boston, Massachusetts, who built “An Emergency Hacksaw Frame” out of some scrap wood and old hacksaw blades
Old books like this, where the diagrams are not computer-generated but carefully drafted, scratch a particular itch for me. Drafting is really a lost art, and one that I fantasize about learning someday, not for practical purposes, but as a craft.
Here’s a selection of a few more gems from the book:
- Note that according to Google Ngram Viewer, “crowdsource” wasn’t used in print until the 2000’s, so this predates the term by ~100 years! ↩︎