taking a deep dive into Industry
I’ve been falling deep into holes about industry—films of things being created, photos of abandoned factories, and more—so this IEC is going to reflect a lot of that. Buckle up.
Let’s start, as it happens, with seat belts. Plane seat belts, and why for the love of god, they are so different from any other seat belt (mostly: cheap, easy to use in an emergency, etc)
Next up, I stumbled onto the website of this amazing photographer, Christopher Payne, who has a beautiful series of photos of how they make Steinway Pianos.
On a related note (pun unintended, I swear), during WWII, Steinway designed a study piano that could be sent overseas (and endure being dropped out of a plane as a result!)
Back to Payne—he also took these haunting photos of the abandoned (Saarinen designed!) Bell Labs building in New Jersey:
An earlier Bell legacy—which sadly does not still exist—is the fact that they moved a whole building in Indianapolis while people were still working inside that month!
All utility cables and pipes serving the building had to be lengthened and made flexible to provide continuous service during the move. A moveable concrete and steel bridge connected the vestibule to a covered walkway. This permitted employees and the public to enter and leave at any time while the move was in progress.
You can see the covered walkway in the second row - it’s the curved piece!
I’m a sucker for all videos of machines making products, but this Faber-Castell video on how they make pencils is riveting:
A series of images about “the end of the Industrial Revolution” aka steel and iron working in Eastern Europe and Russia:
![A foundry worker at Kosaya Gora Ironworks, just south of Moscow. Industrial photographer Viktor Macha says that "sooner or later, we will know this kind of work only through pictures and movies."](https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F551794c6-430f-4b7e-8b5a-59006d7d0841_1023x683.jpeg "A foundry worker at Kosaya Gora Ironworks, just south of Moscow. Industrial photographer Viktor Macha says that "sooner or later, we will know this kind of work only through pictures and movies."")
![The working floor of Kosaya Gora Iron Works, Russia. Shortly after making this image, Macha says he slipped going down a narrow stairwell and slashed open his arm. Bleeding heavily, he made his way to a nearby hospital. "It was not good, the hospitals in this part of Russia are in very bad condition." ](https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1a63c447-47fd-48cf-9b72-a379de978509_650x454.jpeg "The working floor of Kosaya Gora Iron Works, Russia. Shortly after making this image, Macha says he slipped going down a narrow stairwell and slashed open his arm. Bleeding heavily, he made his way to a nearby hospital. "It was not good, the hospitals in this part of Russia are in very bad condition." ")
Finally, as train stations get rid of their analog departure boards (this makes me so sad, I loved watching the board in Penn Station click away as a new departure was listed), artists are using them to create art, and someone hacked the board that’s in MoMA to create a hidden message directing people to an exhibit.
etcetera: The Hudson River is now too clean, so marine borers have returned—and are eating away at every wood pylon in the river! Foley artists on the hardest sounds they’ve had to create (spoilers abound in the examples, FYI)