- Darwin
This is a picture of the Richardson and Boynton steam boiler that heats my apartment (its twin sits nearby and heats our neighbors). Both boilers still occupy the spaces where they were originally set in 1914. Coal is what they first ate, but now they burn gas. In about five years they will have been performing that job for century.
On the other hand my flat screen monitor needs to be replaced, not all my cellphone functions work anymore, and my DVD player is just plain broke. All three of these devices are only two - or less - years old. To repair my DVD player would cost more than it would to buy a new one, or even more than what I paid for it in the first place.
Admittedly, electronics are usually made of lighter materials than cast iron, plastic breaks; but my VCR is twenty years old. An aunt's hand-me-down still going strong. The VHS tapes it plays will quit before it does.
Ever increasing miniaturization and complexity imbue our devices with a valid delicacy. Portability brings destructibility as we move, drop, and spill on our tiny engines. Though I can't help thinking that when modernity equates progress, and the sum becomes synonymous with fashion; modernity and progress become co-opted and corrupted and mutually exclusive of durability. If popular trends were decoupled from the machine, we could be decoupled from the machine; and the machine and we would function better for it. And we would last.
My rotary phone works fine too (knock on wood). Never refurbished. Got it for 5 bucks at the Goodwill. Online refurbished versions of the same model are going for $195.00.
ReplyDeleteMy "Underwood Noiseless" needs some work, but I remember my parents using it for my dad's business when I was a kid. There is a typewriter repair shop down the street I keep meaning to take it to.
I have a 1973 Peugeot racing bicycle. It is periodically street worthy. The French!