andmaybegayer:

I love seeing old versions of complex mechanisms. It’s easy to look at like, a modern security lock or a modern automatic firearm action or a modern cannery machine, and see all those push rods and pawls and ratchets, and think god damn, that’s complicated, how do you even come up with that.

But then you go and look at the very first instance of that thing, and it’s big and airy, nice chunky cast iron rods with loads of room because we didn’t have modern precision engineering, and the pawls are overbuilt because we hadn’t optimized the manufacturing process, and you see all the same parts, but assembled naïvely, and it only cans a twenty cans an hour but hey, you don’t have to do it now, and you can see the way that slow progression would bring you to what you see whizzing past you at a can every second.

It’s a good reminder that very few things start from nowhere, everything is cobbled together from the things that came before it, with a little twist that someone thought of that could make it slightly better.