How It's Made
I love the show How It’s Made. If you’ve never heard of it, the show is a documentary-style presentation of the manufacturing all number of things, from large industrial items like locomotives and cranes to medium-sized dry goods like food, pencils, clothing, you name it. Each episode includes four segments for separate items selected at a randomness that would make a young AI blush. Season 8: Episode 5, to take an example I saw recently, covers the making of horseshoes, dishwashers, graphite fly rods, and frozen pizzas. The show has other charms, too. It has no on-screen host or explanatory text, no talking heads of any sort. The unseen narrator adds a little color here and there about steps in the process and always a final terrible pun. (E.g.: “These high-precision drill bits are never boring.”) The focus is on the making process, and the “It” is treated as the most generic of pronouns.
The Science Channel often puts up a How It’s Made weekend marathon, turning its Saturday afternoon schedule into an assembly line of assembly lines. Surrendering to this lineup brings on a zen-like calm. Over and over I watch raw materials arrive (a tanker truck of eggs, aluminum blanks, huge rolls of kevlar fabric) and methodically take familiar shapes (frozen apple pies, toaster ovens, fanboats). All is becoming and bad jokes.
This show reminds me that so much of our world has been made. We live in New York, where every angle has been calculated and plotted, even the paths in the parks intentionally curved to look found, but it’s largely true no matter where you are. Returning to the kitchen to top off my coffee, I walk across some mass-market tile, probably cut with a water jet, to the vacuum-insulated pot that likely started out as a steel disk forced into shape by a powerful industrial press. Most everything we have and use is a solved puzzle of grand making.
The other thing you notice right away in any episode of How It’s Made is that how things are made is different than you think. We have this notion — or at least I did — that technology has taken people out of the factory in favor of robots crisply swiveling through repetitive and dangerous tasks. Not so. Most production lines are still punctuated by all number of people sorting, loading pieces into machines, controlling quality, placing screws that machines tighten. It’s remarkable, really.
My wife and I have been working from home for about a week, and our teenage kids, M&Q, haven’t been to their high school for just as long. Without the usual markers, we’ve all slipped into a kind of timelessness, unsure about the day or moment. We take a walk to get some new air around us and to see others from the recommended distance. The day is warm and fresh, the kind early March often uses to tease spring, and lots of people stroll with little kids and dogs, and others run along the river. (All the gyms are, of course, closed.) I see a few couples with cups of purchased coffee. Yes, sure, the coffee shops must still be open, even after most other businesses have shuttered. Essential services only. I think about the person who took the order, filled the paper cup, pressed on the lid, exchanged the cash or card with gloved hands. Then I think of those who guided the massive roll of paper to the cup-folding machine, those who slid the bulk plastic into the lid press, those who packed box after box with stacks of each, those who loaded and drove the trucks that brought them here. The industriousness of everything is almost overwhelming, including the virus and the body it needs and destroys, the mind and the stories it tells itself to make sense of ruin.
Each day seems to reveal more of the ragged seams of the world. I think about how people make the stitches — make up the stitches. Even out here in the sun, looking over the Hudson River sending the blue of the sky back up to it, I wonder if everything will be able to hold still, and still hold.