0:00 If you take a pocketknife and scrape a pine shavings off a cedar fence post, you think you're just whittling, but you're actually doing the one thing human hands have done since the stone age: taking off the rough edges so something fits.0:17 Aye, and you've usually got wood dust over your slippers before ten in the morning, Earl.0:24 But there is summat in that, isn't there?0:27 Last week we talked about how humble compressed asbestos gaskets kept steam engines from blowing their cylinder heads off.0:36 Well, abrasives are their quiet cousins.0:39 You don't get a single steam cylinder, train wheel, or microchip without first grinding grit against metal until it behaves.0:48 Ey up, nobody writes love letters to grit, do they?0:52 It's like my pantry floor after baking day—you just want to sweep it out.0:57 Yet without sandpaper and grinding stones, modern factories simply grind to a halt.1:03 They surely do.1:04 Back before the eighteen hundreds, folk used what the creek gave them.1:09 Sandstone, crushed quartz, emery stone shipped out of Greece in wooden barrels.1:15 But natural stone has flaws.1:17 You spin a six-foot sandstone wheel on a water spindle at high speed, and sooner or later, a hidden fissure lets go.1:26 The wheel shatters like a cannon shot.1:29 Ooh, that sounds terrifying, love.1:31 Just flying rock across a dark workshop.1:34 Killed a right smart number of young machinists, too.1:38 And you couldn't get uniform parts that way.1:41 A gunlock made in Harper's Ferry wouldn't fit a rifle made in Springfield because the files and grindstones were never quite the same grit twice.1:52 That's where the pattern breaks, isn't it?1:55 Just like when weavers had to abandon hand-spun yarn because every spool had a different thickness.2:02 If you want an empire of machines, your dirt has to be standard.2:07 Swear on my tackle box, that is the honest truth.2:11 The real shift came in eighteen ninety-one.2:14 A fellow named Edward Goodrich Acheson was trying to cook up artificial diamonds in an iron bowl in Pennsylvania.2:22 He hooked a carbon arc to an electric dynamo, baked clay and powdered coke together, and drew out these little iridescent, purplish crystals.2:33 Little shiny sparks of fake diamond...2:35 Silicon carbide.2:37 He called it Carborundum.2:39 It was hard enough to scratch ruby.2:41 Acheson sold the first ounce or two to diamond polishers in New York for about twenty cents a carat.2:48 But within four years, he built a plant right next to the new hydroelectric generators at Niagara Falls.2:56 Suddenly, instead of digging dull rocks out of an island in the Aegean, human beings were manufacturing hardness itself by the ton.3:06 Right then, but Niagara Falls power wasn't cheap.3:09 So who bought all that grit?3:12 The bicycle makers first, then Henry Ford.3:15 See, Ford's assembly line didn't work because men moved fast.3:19 It worked because the parts finally fit without hand-filing.3:24 In nineteen ten, grinding a hardened steel crankshaft down to one-thousandth of an inch took hours with old natural stones.3:33 With synthetic bonded wheels, it took fifteen minutes.3:37 So the great industrial miracle wasn't the engine at all.3:41 It was the sandpaper chewing the metal smooth enough so the oil wouldn't leak out.3:47 That's the engine of history right there, Bridget.3:51 We build monuments to the locomotives and the automobiles, but the power lived in the grinding shed where nobody wanted to breathe the dust.4:01 And it never really stopped, did it, chuck?4:04 Even now, with all these silicon chips and clean rooms, someone's got to polish those wafer discs flatter than a millpond.4:13 Flatter than a millpond on a windless morning.4:17 Chemical mechanical planarization, they call it.4:20 Using microscopic slurry—nanometer-sized ceramic grit—to rub computer chips down flat within the width of a few atoms.4:29 You can't print billions of tiny transistors if the surface ripples even a fraction of a wave of light.4:36 From rubbing arrowheads on river shale to buffing microchips with liquid dust.4:42 It's all the same trick, isn't it?4:45 Just making surfaces touch each other without catching.4:49 Well.4:49 That is about the size of it.4:51 We spent two hundred years chasing sheer speed, but the true wealth came from the grit that took off the bumps.4:59 Right then, love.5:01 Put your pocketknife away and finish your tea before the sun drops behind the ridge.5:07 Night night, sleep tight, chuck.5:09 Night, Bridget.5:10 See you on the line tomorrow.
