Giedion the Craft of the Locksmith for SOME CENTURIES After the Late Gothic Period, the Locksmith Was Known As the Artisan of a Most Elaborate Handicraft
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MECHANIZATION OF A COMPLICATED CRAFTi Sigfried Giedion The Craft of the Locksmith FOR SOME CENTURIES after the late Gothic period, the locksmith was known as the artisan of a most elaborate handicraft. He united mastery of hand with the gift of untiring inventiveness. His work included, besides locks, all sorts of artistically wrought ironwork: gates, grilles, knobsii, handles, and the fantastic iron ornamentation of chestsiii. The Gothic period was very sparing of bodily comfort but felt strongly that imagination should animate the objects of man’s surroundings. The woodwork of a door is rough and not highly finished; the craftsman spent all his pains on the sensitive area of the door: the keyhole. He framed it with delicate ornamentation as if he were illuminating a manuscript. And the handle that draws the latch he transformed into an abstract serpentine shape ending in an animal head, as in the lock from a house at Visp, Switzerland (fig. 26). Later, in the eighteenth century, the last period of refined handicraft, craftsmen turned their energy to the creation of large-scale works like the wrought-iron grilles, screening choir from naveiv in monastery churches, surrounding parks, or forming the gates of public squares. They wove transparent iron veilsv before the altar or the park. In one case the artist-locksmith, binds into the architectonic space his high iron structure, the water curtains of the sculptured fountains, and the green beyond.1 The development of this artistry ran parallel with the achievement of eighteenth-century furniture and comfort beginning with the last years of Louis XIV and the Regency.2 Louis Sébastien Mercier, the remarkable critic of the end of the Ancien Régime, was one of the first to see a city from a sociologist’s point of view. It has been said that he described the cellar and the attic but forgot the salon. When he comes to the refined handicraft, the critic is carried away. Mercier describes with the directness of a contemporary the high standard of craftsmanship a few years before the French Revolution: ‘Our smith has become an artist. Art has so wrought the metal as to fuse it with architecture; it has been developed into superb grilles which have the advantage of enhancing the view without destroying it. Iron has become as supple as wood. It is twisted at will and changed into light and mobile leaves; its coarsenessvi removed, it is animated with a sort of life.’ But it all died out as the Industrial Revolution set in. What the smith had formerly forgedvii by hand out of iron was then entrustedviii to the moldix. Between 1825 and 1845, as observed in the report of the jury of the Paris International Exhibition of 1867, the highly skilled smiths disappeared from the big cities. Grilles, railings, and balconies had come to be made of cast ironx. By the time of Haussmann’s transformation of Paris under the Second Empire, large i Gepubliceerd in Siegfried Giedion (1975 [1948]) Mechanization takes command ii knob: handvat iii chest: (geld)kist iv screening choir from nave: het koor afschermen van het kerkschip v veil: voile, gordijn vi coarseness: ruwheid vii to forge: smeden viii to entrust: toevertrouwen ix mold, mould: matrijs, gietvorm x cast iron: gietijzer firms had sprung up, offering stocks of cast-iron pieces, from the continuous balconies of the boulevards to cast-iron copies of Michelangelo’s sculpture. Their catalogues were like textbooks of art history, and expanded to three or four hundred pages. But we shall not deal further here with this aspect of mechanization in the locksmith’s trade. It was unfruitful from the historical point of view, for it followed the easy way of mechanization, the sole aim of which is to make copies as cheaply as possible. Mechanization in the locksmith’s sphere is of historical interest only when it chooses the hard way: when it is achieved by creating new methods and new aims. There is no creativeness in the mechanical production of cast-iron grilles and ornaments. To gain an insight into the real nature of mechanization we shall have to confine ourselves to the lock. Nowhere else in this respect did the transition from handicraft to mechanical production take place with such speed and efficiency as in the United States. The steps in this change occurred during the two decades from 1830 to 1850, decades of outstanding importance in the formation of American industry’s distinctive features. At first, the European practice of using wrought iron for the various parts of the lock was followed in America, but almost from the beginning a differentiation began by the substitution of ‘cast material in place of wrought.... This change of material greatly reduced the cost of production, and soon led to changes in design....’3 From Handicraft to Mechanical Production The change from manual to mechanized production has another starting point as well - in bank and safe locks. Out of experience in the construction of these expensive locks, costing from $100 to $400, there evolved in the ‘sixties of the last century a new type of efficient and inexpensive mechanized locks. From the late eighteenth century onward, the problem of the burglar-proof lock fascinated the minds of inventors almost as much as did the solution of the revolving-pistol problem in the late ‘thirties, when the most extravagant solutions were proposed for the automatic change of bullets. Of the multitude of answers offered for the lock problem, we shall isolate one which was developed by Linus Yale, Jr. It came about with the great flood of inventions of the ‘sixties, and may stand as a symbol of the transition to mechanical production in lockmaking. Minor details of Yale’s lock have changed with time, but, as far as the principle is concerned, his final solution of the lock problem was found from the beginning. We are choosing this lock for discussion because in it the principle of the handmade lock is completely changed. It translates ancient as well as recent traditions into terms of elaborate mechanical production. This interplay of things stemming fromi Antiquity with more recent developments has a counterpart in the art of our day. The direct expressions of quite diverse periods, from cavemanii painting to African Negro sculpture, has helped modern artists find a pathway to our own subconscious life. i to stem from: stammen uit ii caveman: holbewoner The Early Stage: The Safe and Burglar-Proof Bank Locks The history of the pin-tumbleri cylinder lock, known as the ‘Yale lock,’4 is closely bound up with the creation of safes and safe locks for preserving valuables from fire and theft. Cast-iron chests for common purposes were made in England about 1780, when cast-iron was first being used in columnsii and even in coffinsiii. The first portable fireproof chests were constructed in France around 1820. Their walls consisted of two iron plates with a layer of heat-resistant material between them.5 Before long they were introduced into the United States. In the late ‘twenties and the early ‘thirties, the Americans tried to improve the construction of the safe and the insulating material of its walls. Its first success was registered in the early ‘thirties on the occasion of a big fire; the public was greatly impressed to see a safe that had survived, with its contents unharmed, the gutting of a building. They spontaneously dubbed it the ‘Salamander,’6 but its official name was at first ‘fireproof’ (as in the Philadelphia Directory of 1838) and later, in the ‘fifties, ‘iron-safe’ (figs. 27, 28). It was in the ‘fifties that the fireproof safe reached its standard form. Widely advertised as an excellent American product, it spread from banks, insurance companies, and factories into the ordinary store and private house. But some wonderment even then, it seems, clungiv to the idea of a catastrophe-resistant container. Wood’s store in this place has been consumed by fire last night.... The heat melted the hinges of the doors, a smoke of heat was coming out of the safe containing all our books and money ... a crowd gathered around to see it opened ... but to their astonishment every book, paper and the money came out perfect as far as the paper and the writing was concerned.7 The development of the fireproof safe and of bank locks coincides with the rise of industry, large-scale banking and finance, the growth of the stock exchange, expanding wealth, the multiplication of fortunes. As the first opulentv residences were being built along Regent’s Park in London for the anonymous rising class established around 1825 through the development of industry and trade,8 fireproof chests and burglar-proof locks were at hand. The Refinement of the Bank Lock On the technical side, the mechanized lock of Linus Yale has its roots in the complicated mechanism of burglar-proof bank locks. The French excelled in everything connected with refined handicrafts, from furniture and painting - the highest skill of the human hand - to amazingly cunningvi automatons. The lock, as normally used since the fifteenth century, keeps the door closed by means of a boltvii held fast by a spring. The key, passed through the keyhole, directly acts with its winged i tumbler: tuimelaar ii collumn: pijler iii coffin: brandkast iv to cling: vasthouden aan v opulent: weelderig vi cunning: vernuftig vii bolt: grendel end on the bolt so that by twisting the key one moves the bolt that locks or unlocks the door. Its principle is that the biti of the key acts directly, without any intermediary, on the bolt.