Detritus of Industry

                 In Liberty Maine, two unusual establishments flank Main Street. One is a hardware store with every shelf and surface covered in a comprehensive assortment of tools, fasteners, jigs and fixtures. The other is a small museum, dedicated to the tools themselves. The store is unusual for the depth and breadth of the collection, with literally thousands of items with their origins in New England machine shops. The industrial revolution along with the machine shop knowledge and technology that accompanied the movement meant that the roots of management and manufacturing theory were laid down firmly in New England soil. Many of the developments that set the stage for the economic boom of the 20th century through mass production in America were born here, so it is fitting that they be well remembered here as well. Both the store and the museum in Liberty Maine do that quite well.

Browsing at Liberty Tool
(photo: Elisa Hamilton)

                Many of the machine shop items, like fixtures and modified cutting tools, rarely left the shop for anything other than recycling or the landfill. Once a job had run to completion, the specialized and often improvised tooling was no longer needed and so began a downward trajectory. With more and more shops reducing manual machining in part or completely, these objects take on a greater presence as artifacts, both of technological history but also the human history. In a computer controlled machining operation, the rate of travel can be nearly perfectly controlled, resulting in an excellent, even finish.

Machine shop odds and ends purchased at Liberty Tool

                The manually machined part, in comparison, has tell-tale tooling marks where the cutting tool moved along the work piece at anything approaching an uneven rate. These tiny variations impart a (translated) imprint of the human hand, working through a mechanical medium, rather than directly. From these marks we can read into the skill of the machinist, the priorities demanded of the part (whether surface finish was important for its function), and the era of its making. In the quiet corners of these buildings in Liberty, one can get a true sense of the presence and importance of machine shops to New England, rather than relegating the collective memories and bits of metal to the scrap bin of history.