Much of our prosperity and wealth is based on our ability to produce faster, better, and cheaper than ever before.
Ladies and gentlemen, we are living in an era of unprecedented prosperity. No generation before ours has had as much material wealth as we have. This is largely due to manufacturing. The story I’d like to tell here is how manufacturing has evolved over thousands and millions of years.
One small part of it is: how can you produce something?
That’s just a small part. It’s more of a technology story: how can I make something? Much more important for manufacturing: how can I do it faster? How can I make it better? And most importantly, how can I make it cheaper?
So it’s by making production faster, better, and cheaper that we’ve achieved much of the prosperity we enjoy today. However, let’s start from the beginning.
Let’s go back two and a half million years to the first production. In this case, the production of stone hand axes in the Stone Age. Homo habilis gave birth to them. They were also the first member of the genus Homo, to which we also belong as Homo sapiens. It is no coincidence that habilis comes from the Latin word for toolmaker or jack of all trades.
Homo habilis was the first to really get into manufacturing. Now we know very little about the production of that time, but we have learned a few things. For example, the longest production in the world is a place in Africa where stones were processed for about a million years.
The production site was located between two mountains. Ten kilometers in one direction was one mountain, and ten kilometers in the other direction was another mountain. We also learned that there was one corner where new hand axes were made. The fragments in this place correspond to the stones that were made for the new hand axes. Nearby, old hand axes were sharpened. The fragments at this site correspond to fragments of used hand axes that were recycled and repaired.
Of course, you might ask why the new hand axes were in one place and the used ones in another? The logical conclusion would be that they already had a first division of labor. It is uncertain, but it is likely that some were already specialized in making new hand axes. Others specialized in refining old hand axes. Finally, others, who were not as skilled with their hands, specialized in retrieving stones from ten kilometers away and returning them to their place.
This is the first evidence of the division of labor. The division of labor allows us to learn faster. We learned how to do something faster. Thanks to this, we became faster, better, and-okay, in the Stone Age this was not so relevant-but… cheaper. This means that thanks to the division of labor, we have already optimized production in the Stone Age.
We usually divide production methods into six groups. The first technique for making stone tools was cutting.
The second technique was to change the properties of the material 120,000 years ago. What you see here is a spearhead. Wooden spears have been around for a long time, but this spearhead is hardened. When you put wood in a fire, it burns. However, if you carefully put the wood in the fire, turn it over, and don’t leave it for too long, the water and moisture will evaporate and the spear will become harder. This means that already 120,000 years ago there was a technique for producing “changing the properties of a material.” [Side note: after the presentation I learned that there was an even older technique that treated stone with heat to make better stone tools.]
The next technique was compounding 72,000 years ago. At that time, arrowheads were attached to a wooden shaft using resin and other materials. Two were made into one piece and the parts were joined together.
Covering has been around for about 30,000 years, for example in the form of cave paintings. The molding has been around for 25,000 years. The figure was formed from bone dust and clay and then fired.
Molding has also been around for almost 10,000 years. For molding, we usually need metal. Metal is a plastic material. As early as 10,000 years ago, small beads and pendants were molded from metal.
If you know a little bit about history, you would say: “Wait a minute! We definitely need metalworking for metal, and that’s from the Bronze Age. But that didn’t even start ten thousand years ago! “
That’s right. Metal is a so-called native metal that occurs in nature in its purest form. It’s not often, but occasionally you can find a piece of copper in nature. They used to hammer these pieces. Before they knew how to liquefy or extract it, they struck it and formed things that way.
So, all six of the manufacturing technologies we know were used in some form during the Stone Age. Of course, there have been significant technological advances since then.