A Quiet Masterpiece on the Zipper, and Why it is Better to Repair a Zipper than Blow Up a Tree Stump

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 229

This is an example of a quiet, naive masterpiece, and is a perfect companion to a fantastic pamphlet that I wrote about earlier this month on flagpole painting. This tall (11x8 inch) 35-page 1945 work with an impossible title has everything that you would need to know--as its title promises and delivers--to repair a zipper.  Not replace a zipper--repair it.  It is so beautiful as to want to make every engineer residing in the deepness of everyones' soul just simply weep.  The pamphlet is simply but well illustrated and addresses 50-odd contingencies for zipper malfunction and failure, and speaks to a particular WWII mindset that that addresses problems in this very fashion. Repair rather than replace.  The bottom line here is that this is as good as any book of the history of fluxions or the making of the atomic bomb or cooking up a virus, given the parameters and limitations of its subject. 

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(I have a pamphlet somewhere that was published by Dupont that would've been a great cross-purpose reference, only I cannot find it. It was called Stump Blasting.  And, yes, since it was published by the DuPont Chemical Corporation it heavily sold the idea to farmers of how useful dynamite can be for just about any job.  And I don't disagree outright, but the approach to the philosophies of problem-solving couldn't be more different, especially contrasting the Stump Blasting pamphlet with the Stump Removal one produced by a chain manufacturer. 

And so how does it come to pass that someone ostensibly trying to write a history of science blog that has been changed to a history of ideas blog finds himself at almost-midnight on a Sunday plugging away on a post about zipper repair and stump blasting?  (And how often to do those five words come together in a sentence? ) Simple:  its about the methodology and the approach to figuring out a problem.  On the one hand, you have a circumstance where the problem is addressed, solved and eradicated; on the other, the problem is simply eradicated without the "solved" part.  (Zippers really shouldn't fail all that often--the guy who patented the modern zipper in 1906 said that the zipper should work 200,000 times.) Personally I think that it is better in the long run to solve the problem rather than just replace it or blow it up. Perhaps we're just living in a BIU ("blow it up") kind of world, but I think we could use more zipper-repair approaches to thinking.

Comments

[Rick]

You are right, John, that the tendency these days is more and more toward toss-and-replace instead of repair/reuse.

Example: fifteen years ago, a LaserJet printer designed as a personal printer was priced around $600. It was expensive because HP made them well. They lasted, too. And, they were printers which could be repaired. I have one in my office which is roughly ten years old.

Today, the LaserJet which fits the same niche in HP's line costs about $270, prints about three times as fast as did the old personal printer, and has an expected life of maybe three years. The expectation is that people will throw them away (we can hope that means with proper environmentally friendly disposal) because buying a new one at $270 makes a ton more economic sense than spending $250 or more repairing the old one.

It's reflected in the small businesses we see today, too. I'm sure you remember, John, how many little one-man shops existed 40 years ago, all with their own specialty. TV and radio repair, vacuum repair, lawnmower repair, small-appliance repair, and so on. How many are still around today? I marveled for years at the tenacity of one man who had a hole-in-the-wall little TV and VCR repair business at one end of a strip mall which I could see from the street as I drove by.

Last week, his store was gone, the "TV REPAIR" sign removed from the front window where it had been taped up for as long as I can remember--at least twenty years.

[Jeff]

FYI ... we still have two TV repair places in Salida, pop. <6,000. I have to say I thought the one was out of business years ago, but it's still in the yellow pages. But Dick's Electronics we've used a couple times. Less than a hunnerd bucks each fixed a couple of big TVs good as new. He advertises VCR/DVD repair, too, which is hard to believe. Dick's a nice guy, though. Little house. Workshop in the front room. Carpet everywhere to catch little parts. Now if we only had a typewriter repair shop.

[john ptak]

Thanks to Jeff and Rick for their thoughts on the passing of eras. I've noticed that any decent electrical thing with a moving part will cost at least $250 to repair, no matter what it is. (Now that I've seen how the repairman replaced the belt around the drum of my dryer I to can do that 250 dollar deal for 28 fifty.)
And speaking of typewriters, here's a terrific obituary of a famous typewriter repair man: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C05EEDB1139F932A35751C1A963958260