Garum, pyramids, Roman roads, medieval automatons: these share little in common, except that we don’t quite know how they were made. Their “recipes,” in other words, have been lost. (Garum is not an engineering marvel but a fermented condiment similar to Southeast Asian fish sauce, whose exact characteristics are not known precisely.) Then there is byssus, or “sea silk,” known throughout the Mediterranean world in antiquity and mentioned on the Rosetta Stone; it is an impossibly airy yet warm silk spun from the filaments which Pinna nobilis, a giant mollusk, uses to attach itself to rocks under the sea. The rulers of the ancient world prized byssus, and it was always a luxury good, even though the means by which it was produced were once widely known.
Today, one Sardinian woman named
Chiara Vigo is believed to be the last person on the planet who knows how to
harvest and process sea silk. Vigo, who is Jewish, was quoted in a B.B.C.
interview saying, “Weaving the sea silk is what my family has been doing for centuries.
The most important thread, for my family, was the thread of their history,
their tradition.”
For every story like this which is reported as a
bittersweet human interest story or a historical curiosity, there are probably
dozens or hundreds of lost or forgotten crafts, not of any vital importance to
modern civilization, but nonetheless representing the extinguishing of lives
and generations of work and refinement. Knowledge can be rediscovered or
relearned, as it was several centuries after the collapse of the western Roman
Empire. In order to remain in circulation, however, knowledge must be embodied
and exercised. In some ways, knowledge is more a form of culture than it is a
“recipe.” It doesn’t, and can’t, fully exist except by being known, used, and
practiced by living people. And it is not only artifacts from the ancient world
which can be lost or forgotten.
Some time ago I remember reading an architect’s praise
of the beautiful stonework that was once common in America’s civic and
commercial buildings. This was on Twitter, so naturally an interlocutor was
ready with what must have seemed like a rebuttal of sorts: in those days
America had a large number of European immigrant stonemasons who were poor and
whose labor was cheap. Beautiful buildings were a quirk of a historical moment;
perhaps they were even an ugly reminder of our exploitation of cheap laborers.
This response was not entirely wrong, but it is worth
observing that workmanship and artistry are not congruent with affluence, and
neither is the carefully and incrementally accumulated knowledge that makes
such exquisite workmanship possible. The twin rises of affluence and
mechanization beginning with the Industrial Revolution have nearly wiped out
poverty and massively raised material standards of living. But they have also
rendered many traditional forms of craftsmanship obsolete and inefficient, and
so obviated a great deal of such slowly and incrementally accumulated
knowledge. The art of building towns and cities is like the above-mentioned
hypothesis about stonemasonry writ large. By the first decades of the twentieth
century, America’s urban centers had fallen deeply out of favor, and many were
in a sorry state. But in the 1960s and 1970s, buoyed by the sense that suburban
sprawl had begun to despoil the American landscape, Americans began to discover
a new appreciation for historic places. In this period, confining myself only
to the region in which I live, historic Annapolis in Maryland, Old Town
Alexandria across from Washington, D.C., and the small Virginia villages of
Clifton and Waterford were restored after decades of neglect, and today they
are valued for their historic charm. This process of urban revitalization—quite
distinct from, and probably the opposite of, “urban renewal”—took place all
across the country.
It took another ten or twenty years, however, for
Americans to awaken to the fact that they no longer quite knew how to build places like this. As James Howard Kunstler, an early popularizer of what
became known as the New Urbanism, once put it, old buildings, designed with the
expectation that they would last for a very long time, “embodied a sense of
chronological connectivity.” This attitude “lends meaning and dignity to our
little lives” and “puts us in touch with the ages and with the eternities.”
Even a building as commonplace and commercial as a hotel was built with a
deliberation scarcely imaginable today. Here is what Kunstler wrote in his book
Home From Nowhere about the old Grand Union Hotel
in Saratoga Springs, New York, then a small city of less than fifteen thousand
people:
The layers of intersecting patterns at work in this place were extraordinarily rich. The patterns had a quality of great aliveness, meaning they worked wonderfully as an ensemble, each pattern doing its job while it supported and reinforced the other patterns. The hotel was therefore a place of spectacular charm. It was demolished in 1953.
The first generation of New Urbanists visited pre-World War II towns,
neighborhoods, and cities, observing and recording the fine details of curbs,
streets, setbacks, and more. So much of the country’s existing fabric was built
according to traditional methods and design standards, yet that working body of
knowledge, that “information ecosystem,” was more or less extinct by the 1980s,
buried under a regulatory avalanche of single-use zoning and car-oriented
planning. The ideas of the streetscape, the interplay between private and
public spaces, the street as a “public room,” no longer animated planning or architecture.
While it had once been possible to build with beauty almost unconsciously,
relying on that body of knowledge, it is now considered something of a boutique
concern. New Urbanists essentially had to treat existing American settlements
as specimens and use them to reverse engineer that old understanding of
town-building. What are now known as “form-based codes” were attempts to codify
this previously widely known body of town-building and place-making knowledge.
America’s older settlements aren’t pyramids. They’re
places that were continually lived in, even at the lowest point in the fortunes
of our urban places. Nonetheless, a new and very different land-use and
city-building regime had muscled out the more informal, incremental,
fine-grained approach which yielded the places we find beautiful today, but
struggle to build anew.
But back to those skilled stonemasons. The Fairfield
Carmelites, a community of nuns in Fairfield, Pennsylvania, are in the process
of building a complex based on low-tech, Old World construction techniques.
They wanted to build one of their utility buildings with dry stone: stones cut
to fit together and bear loads without the use of mortar. There was one
problem: virtually no architect or builder in the United States still knew how
to build in this method. The Carmelites eventually found Neil Rippingale, a
Scotch stonemason. Though hailing from a farming family rather than one of
stoneworkers, Rippingale has risen to the top of his tiny profession; the
Preservation Trades Network, a nonprofit dedicated to traditional building
methods, describes him as “probably the most qualified drystone project manager
in the [United States], possibly in the world.” This ancient craft lives on
only by such conscious and dedicated preservation.
Does “Polynesian chicken” deserve the same dedicated
preservation? Is America worse off for
forgetting how to make “Butterfly shrimp with bacon?” Maybe not, but the
Chinese-American family that runs The Woks of Life, a wonderfully detailed online compendium of recipes, travel stories,
and cultural commentary, has resurrected them just in case. These two early
Americanized Chinese dishes rarely if ever appear on menus but were once
mainstays. Bill, the “dad in The Woks of Life family,” grew up around a Chinese-takeout kitchen in a Catskills Holiday
Inn, where his father was a chef. Polynesian chicken was both an a la carte
dish and a component of the “Polynesian Luau for five.” On the recipe’s page
online, Bill writes, “Like many of the recipe requests we’ve received from
readers, this one is pretty unique. It’s a little piece of Chinese-Americana
circa 1975, and you likely won’t find it anywhere else.” Butterfly shrimp in
bacon? Similar story. The dish was widely available on Americanized Chinese
menus in the 1960s, was probably not invented by a Chinese chef, and is
virtually extinct today.
When you look up these recipes online, there are sources
other than Woks of Life. But most of them appear to be merely copies of their
versions. This suggests that in the absence of a single Chinese-American family
of cooking enthusiasts, these recipes might not currently be available to
anybody who didn’t once cook or eat them. Are they actually worth cooking or
eating? Are they lost, or simply obsolete? That’s a matter of taste. But their
preservation, which entails not merely record keeping but actual labor, is in
some ways a work of love.
Sometimes, the recipe is more like a blueprint, an
almost irreducibly complex manufacturing or engineering process. This is the problem
facing the world’s very small but ardent community of cassette tape
enthusiasts. Cassette players, blank cassette tapes, and even commercial
releases on cassette still exist. In fact, tracking the widely noted “vinyl
revival,” sales of cassettes, to the surprise of analysts and most ordinary
people, have been increasing over the last several years. With slow and halting
progress, some new tape formulations have even been developed, in response to
the dwindling supply of blank tape left over from the cassette’s glory days.
(If you find a blank Maxell or T.D.K. cassette of recent manufacture for sale
somewhere, which still occasionally seems to happen, there’s a good chance the
actual tape inside is new-old-stock from many years ago.) Resurrecting old tape
formulations and manufacturing lines, or developing new ones, has been a bit of
a learning curve, and the best formulations from the 1980s or 1990s have still
not been surpassed in quality by anything in production today.
But while the cassette releases and blank tape are
blooming, the hardware side is failing to catch up to this newfound enthusiasm.
The last cassette players good enough to qualify as home hi-fi machines were
produced in the early 2000s. Even at that point, with the format’s sales slipping
and with C.D. players widely affordable, cassette decks and players were
trending towards the budget end of the market, with all the attendant
cost-cutting measures.
The real guts of a cassette player are the mechanism or
transport, including the record and playback head. Every company that made
cassette equipment once had a storehouse of proprietary transport designs.
Today, a single cassette mechanism remains in production: a Chinese clone,
produced in several slightly differing variants and levels of quality, of a
1986 Japanese boombox mechanism discontinued in 2009. As far as anybody in the
cassette hobby has been able to determine, this is truly the end of the line.
Which is to say, any device you can buy new today that plays cassettes, no
matter its price tag, contains this budget mechanism.
It is widely believed that much important I.P. relevant
to the production of high-performance cassette decks is either lost or
destroyed. While most brand names from the hi-fi golden age survive, only a few
survive as intact, continuously operating organizations. Consider Nakamichi, a
Japanese manufacturer credited with producing the highest fidelity cassette
decks ever made. It was acquired in 1998 by a Hong Kong-based holding company,
and survives today only as a brand name. What happened to the reams and reams
of design documents and schematics? It is very unlikely they all still exist.
In 1998, nobody, much less a holding company snapping up a desirable nameplate,
thought the cassette market would ever again be a growth opportunity. The
actual embodied engineering skills, the ability to read a schematic and to
understand the complexities and the possibilities of improvement, are nearly
gone. So is the equipment that produced the cassette players, and all the networks
of factories full of tooling for high-performance stereo heads and dozens of
precision parts.
Eamonn Fingleton, a China and Japan watcher who
advocates for American industrial policy, argues that when an industry is
offshored, the important loss is not so much that the finished product is made
in another country. Rather, the true loss is the entire ecosystem of
accumulated knowledge surrounding that product, and the embodied engineering
know-how that might evolve into further innovations. Cassette players were lost
not to free trade but to the forward march of technology. But while we might
have judged that knowledge worthless twenty years ago, it’s curious that some
already pine for it. (And on the matter of accumulated knowledge, it is also
curious that Sony and Fujifilm are today at the forefront of high-density
magnetic tape cartridges for data storage. Perhaps all those decades working
with and innovating off of tape yielded an edge there.)
Fingleton’s theme is that manufacturing is about learning by doing. To that we might add the converse: forgetting by not
doing. If cassette players are of no interest, understand that this is a
general point, and it applies to much simpler devices and manufacturing
processes. A turntable, for example, is a much simpler device than a cassette
deck, both mechanically and electronically. Furthermore, unlike the playback
and record heads that constitute the core of a tape player, turntable
cartridges and styluses at all levels of quality have continuously remained in
production. There is no engineering obstacle to producing a high-quality
turntable. Or so you would think.
When the iconic Japanese electronics brand Technics (a
division of Panasonic) brought out an updated version of their classic SL-1200
turntable about five years ago, they ran into what might sound like an
unexpected issue: the fabrication of lots of small, individual parts. Jonathan
Danbury, an executive of Technics, has pointed out that production costs are
higher now than they were fifty years ago. Despite the fact that his company
has manufactured millions of turntables for the SL-1200 series, absorbed development
costs that might have lowered prices are effectively canceled out. “None of
those parts or tools exist any more (except for the lid),” he said in a recent
interview, “so we literally have to start from scratch. The present day price
of making all of the parts and dies is astronomical compared to what it was.”
Elsewhere it has been reported that the original SL-1200 series was
discontinued in part because mouldings and other devices integral to production
had been worn out.
The recipes, in the form of
patents, still exist. But even if you don’t lose the recipe, you may not be
able to make it. This is a prime example of what it means to say that knowledge
is something embodied: use it or lose it. The
recipe itself cannot contain all the knowledge that goes into the final
product. These products are not conceived of and brought to market in one or
two simple steps, or assembled by hand in a manner that can be preserved by a
small number of artisans. They arise out of a large interconnected industrial ecosystem;
engineers, designers, prototypers, tool and die shops, fabrication shops.
(Apple ran into this issue, in attempting to assemble MacBooks in the United
States, with as simple an “ingredient” as a screw.)
One can look with detached curiosity at unknown ancient
Egyptian stone-cutting techniques. But there’s something deeply unsettling
about the idea that a consumer-grade product produced at scale within most
Americans’ living memory is in some sense already lost to time.
The maintenance of any of this knowledge, whether
construction techniques or cultural artifacts or industrial processes, is a
thorny issue from the perspective of public policy. At a basic level, knowledge
can be archived such that it can be studied, and at least not entirely lost. But
it’s another matter to keep an obsolete product in production just in case
people feel nostalgic for it in twenty years or to keep tastes in food or style
from changing. There isn’t always an answer, much less a government solution
even if it strikes us as necessary. Perhaps the human imperative to preserve
hard-won but seemingly useless knowledge no longer necessary is like Christ’s
imperative to “be perfect,” seemingly impossible but worth striving for
nonetheless.
At the very least we would do well to cultivate a sense
of humility: an understanding that we rely on generations’ worth of knowledge
for things we never even think about. In Isaac Newton’s famous words, we stand
on the shoulders of giants, even if they were giants who merely inherited the craft
of stonework or wrapped shrimp in bacon and called it Chinese food. Maybe there
is no answer, but that does not mean there is no problem. Most of us find it
difficult to escape the impression that, in comparison with a world in which we
were much poorer, when all manner of consumer products cost much more when
adjusted for inflation, we are experiencing a lower standard of living, a
texture of everyday life that is vaguely but increasingly unpleasant.
What if all the recipes we’ve lost amount to something
difficult to describe yet more substantial than simply discrete products or
food items going off the market or out of circulation? Virtually every locus of
power in modern, post-industrial society implicitly or explicitly believes that
the new recipe will be better, and that therefore preserving the old one is a
non-issue. But what if it isn’t? What if future generations feel, rightly, that
the sum of human knowledge has in some ways shrunk, narrowed and been denied to
them? What if they see the value we failed to see in the untold lifetimes of
labor embedded in the things we casually threw away? These sorts of questions
are not even on the radar of policymakers, and when they are raised, it is too
often in the service of nationalism or nativism, rather than a positive,
authentic vision of preserving culture and art for their own sake. Certainly
none of these are questions that economics or policy can fully answer. But they
are important questions—human questions—and given the palpable and growing sense of
unease in the developed, post-industrial world, they aren’t questions we’re
likely to stop asking.
Addison
Del Mastro writes on urbanism and cultural history. His work has appeared in City Journal, America, the Bulwark, and other
publications.