On lost arts, and vanishing icons.

Image stolen from Wikipedia

vanishing icons.

Know what this is??.... Most won't, but this simple looking piece of furniture gave birth to the age of technology we live in. 

Before Computers and cad,  Engineers, Artists, Draftsmen and Architects designed our reality by hand, skilled fingers put pencils and pens to vellum and made some of the most stunning works of mankind posable on this simple looking device. 

  Drafting tables are quickly becoming a vanishing species, in industrial and commercial settings.  Save for among students and artists, few now seem to prefer manual work to the ease that the personal computer brings.  With my interest in old machinery last year I had casually started buying drafting sets, and books on technical drawing.  A  few tool purchases led to a bit of research, which of course, led to the desire for a drafting table of my own.   Looking, in a brief moment of fog-eyed consumerism I considered a new table, but with the dismal quality of the $150 ish student tables at the craft store, and the $300+ cost of a vintage wooden table, I nearly gave up.  

Days later, while browsing craigslist I stumbled upon the ad, laced with the words every deal hunter desires, adjectives like, "Moving", and "Must Go". So I made the trip into the city, around by-passes and through pot holes big enough to swallow a semi, down to an out of the way self storage  area where I met "Doug" former Engineer and motivated seller.   Shortly after, my war torn Jeep Cherokee was packed to the roof with 300lbs of a  ca. 1985 Hamilton, fully adjustable Drafting table.  

I sit at it now, tinkering with a sketch of a GWR Pannier tank locomotive, or some farm building I'd like to build, and I reflect at the history that even this (In Comparison) very young table experienced. My table may have only had a twenty year life of designing gas stations, but it's brothers and cousins were used to design everything from steam locomotives to space shuttles. Workspaces touched by skilled hands and  brilliant minds, works of art flowed from them under the thin guise of blueprints and technical drawings.  

Yes, the computer is worlds ahead of pencils and paper,  drafting machines and erasers, and out friend the drafting desk,  but something of the soul is lost in it now, something of the person behind the creation.