Everything Is Made

There are a lot of human-made things in the world.  In fact, if you live in the developed world, unless you are a farmer, or an extreme nature enthusiast, probably most of the objects you touch in the course of a day are "made" things.  Now sometimes I rant about the apparently lack of thought that went into making some of those things, but I also find amazing the cumulative total amount of thought, and effort, and logistical backing that goes into making just about everything.

Pick something REALLY simple, like a cafeteria spoon.  Stamped out of stainless steel sheet with a chrome finish, they sell for about 10 cents each.  They are likely produced in a big metal press, probably somewhere in China.  Someone had to design the spoon itself, with the exact size and shape and any stylistic flourishes, in order to make it.  But someone also had to design the press, and the hydraulics to run the press, and the hydraulic fluid in the cylinders, and the control system for the pumps, and mounting system to fix the press to the factory floor.

Someone else had to make sure that there was sheet metal of proper thickness, quality, and composition from which to press the spoon.  That required metalurgists, working together with refinery plant operators, to get from ore to metal of the right composition, and then a whole lot of industrial process control to roll it out into uniform sheets.

And getting the ore out of the ground required massive mining equipment like earth movers.  Each tire on those earth movers required an entire supply chain of its own.  Which was in turn fed by bulk rubber material and other chemicals that make up the rubber, and more metal, and more manufacturing machinery, with even more chemists, material scientists, industrial process designers, and engineers behind them.

So goes the chain of causality backward, until that one simple spoon has required the input of thousands of people and hundreds of industries.  Of course, those thousands of people were simultaneously making possibly thousands of other products as well.  And the mining, metal processing, hydraulic press manufacturing, and so on were all happening simultaneously.  But it is surprising to think how much making stands behind that cheap little cafeteria spoon, and by extension virtually everything else with which we interact daily.