"What is your 'audience'?"
When I announced that I was beginning this project, ca., 2004, friends inquired, helpfully: "What is your 'audience'?" For a web-based "book", my audience will indeed a problem, since currently, I want to speak equally to all potentially interested groups:
(1) academic,
(2) amateur woodworkers themselves, and perhaps even
(3) the lay public.
As I toil toward completing this project, especially the research where I uncover more and more about the hidden history of amateur woodworking, I am becoming convinced that I need to inject both more of my own experience in woodworking and my own interpretations of that experience into the narrative.
About an "interpretation of my own experience," let me say several things:
First, from my academic background, I have acquired a respect for the body of knowledge generated by a group of scholars working together in a particular area. While, as a rule, they work competitively with one another, they also work in a cooperative setting. In other words, there is a tension in the community of scholars,
often called discourse communities, but the tension is friendly, and definitely not violent. Furthermore, the results are impressive. Given this conviction, I will as a endeavor to unearth and weave into my narrative the work of other scholars. Again, though, not much
scholarly research has been conducted in woodworking history.
Second, I want to single out at least two Websites, both essential for Tracing Woodworking History:
- Directory of American Tools and Machinery Patents: Useful website, a virtual database dedicated to patents of power woodworking tools. Includes diagrams patentees needed to submit for obtaining patents. Use Internet Explorer Browser, and Broadband speed is nice.
- Old Woodworking Machines: A remarkable website, dedicated to documenting vintage woodworker's power machinery. Lots of links, pictures of restored vintage power machinery, reproductions of old catalogs, discussion forum, 100s of members, many expert in the historical details of individual tools, just a virtual goldmine.
Third, as for experience at woodworking, for close to a half century, to a greater or lesser degree, I have personally "practiced" woodworking, with varying degrees of satisfaction and success. Over the years, I have built (at least) one piece(s) of furniture for my whole house,
except a bed. I have built chairs, tables, book shelves, armoires, cradles, chests of drawers, and numerous other pieces, of which I have long forgotten. I have also built a few of my own tools (scroll down an look on the left for my reconstructed shaper table; not pictured are several tables for radial arm/compound miter saws, routers, and drill presses). And I have built many, many jigs. The
following links lead to a few examples: 1. shop made bandsaw table and fence 2. Jig for creating pictures with compound miters 3. Jigs for creating and gluing up arts and crafts table legs. 4. (not yet uploaded).
(Jigs, for the woodworking cognoscente, are homemade tools, or adjuncts to manufacturers' tools,
especially power tools, that help make these tools operate more efficiently, and/or more safely. Taken together, all items mentioned above, but especially the "jigs", strongly suggest that, perhaps more than any other profession, rather than from top down, woodworking has developed from the bottom up. (Chapter 2, when it's completed, features a discussion of the "evolution of multiple cutting knives". )
Fourth, my history of woodworking will be primary-source driven. As much as possible, this history will be told from the perspective of people and events contemporary to the period being discussed. Already, I have uploaded several primary sources on my website, and, to get better control of them, have listed and annotated them on a separate page. [link needed]
Fifth, Glossary of terms associated with woodworkers and woodworking. My glossary is under construction, and won't uploaded until this History nears completion.
(Choosing words for the preceding paragraphs was difficult. I had to think whether, as an amateur woodworker -- especially when you do it only on the weekend, as I did throughout my 40-year professional career in the academic world -- do you "Practice" woodworking? "Engage" in woodworking? Or "Do" woodworking? With my academic background, I know that it is common to specify engaging in research activities as "conducting research", but never have I heard the phrase, "conducting woodwork". Instead, "conducting woodwork" immediately strikes you as totally inappropriate, "over the top", as you often hear today as a way of characterizing something considered excessive.)
What is an amateur woodworker?
For professional woodworkers' satisfying clients is the "bottom line". For amateur woodworkers, the client is the "self". Thus, if the amateur woodworker has a degree of self-respect, he/she will not be satisfied with amateurish results. Indeed, it is not difficult to visualize that frequently amateur woodworking is equal -- not superior -- to professional results.
The periodical, Amateur Work, Vol 1, 1902, p. 64, says this about defining what is "amateur work". Amateur Work's motivation for this discussion of the meaning of amateur in that magqzine was generated by the unexpected accolade that it received in an issue of the profressional trade periodical, Modern Machinery. In the review of Amateur Work published in the December 1901 issue of Modern Machinery, the article's author, ? Worcester, defines as amateur "a lover of any art or science, though not a professor of it."
[Back to Document 1]
(I believe that in this context "professor" refers to the act of "professing" something, such as professing woodworking, and not to "professor", as in university professor. Editors at Amateur Work took exception "to the limitations placed upon the word 'amateur'. )
Amateur Work, say the editors,
is for those who engage in work for the love of it, or the pleasure derived from it, that [this magazine] is published, and while most of the topics will be treated in an elemental way, the scope of the magazine is not restricted to this class.
My personal woodworking experience
Here's where I think that my experience -- both as an amateur woodworker and as a journeyman researcher/writer -- counts.
Ex: I have many back issues of woodworking journals, collected from the beginning (i.e., 1976, when woodworking magazines first began to appear). For background on woodworking in the latter half of the 20th century, I have (slowly) paged through them, issue by issue, noting things possible to included in my text. There are many!
Some early comments by the original editors of the magazines are fascinating, especially today, in retrospect, when so much has changed since the beginnings in the 1970s. Before 1976, the founding year of Fine Woodworking, no magazine existed that was dedicated solely to woodworking. Today, there are many, not only in America, but Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, as well as other areas.
What conditions, i.e., social, political, economic, technological, aesthetic, were needed before amateur woodworking took off?
But woodworking, including amateur woodworking -- including amateur woodworking -- has a very, very long history. Nonetheless, although amateur woodworking always existed, the practice of woodworking as a leisure activity before or at the beginning of the 20th century was, of necessity, conducted under much different conditions then compared with today, or even in the mid-century. Read for example, the article that I've posted on my history of woodworking website as: Document no. 2: Chicago-based journalist, Phil Creden's "America Rediscovers Its Hands" (1953), and contrast it with the Document no. 1, by the New Yorker, A L Hall, "My Workshop at Home" (1908).
The point is that several factors, outside the purview of amateur woodworking, needed to be in place in America, before amateur woodworking became an matter of interest for men to considr it as a leisure time activity. Among these factors are :
- sufficient disposable income for potential woodworkers to purchase hand and power tools;
- the luxury of sufficient leisure time to actually engage in woodworking as a hobby;
- home electrification;
- the development of an economic fractional horsepower motor,
- the availabilty on the market of hand and power tools of a scale appropriate for use in home workshops.
All these matters and more are things needed to be in placee before amateur woodworking, as a movement, could take off.
Each of these issue will be dealt with, first, in very brief discussion, in these introductory paragraphs, but later -- appropriately, chapter by chapter -- in greater detail. (Chapter contents are listed on the table of contents page.)
What is my approach to this History?
[needs more editing] As the successive chapters of my history of amateur woodworking are completed and uploaded on the Web, readers will discover that I have "scoured the literature", "done my homework", as they say, in my efforts to uncover what, without exaggeration, is a "virtually secret history of woodworking", at least as this history relates amateur woodworking, in this century.
However, in my attempt to expose this human activity, much to my satisfaction, much information can be uncovered. The chemistry, i.e., the "chemistry" involved in human affairs, is complex, and I continue to search for the broader explanations
[Need to work in Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz, "The Origins of Technology-Skill Complementarity," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 113, No. 3. (Aug., 1998), pp. 693-732, in with G Leslie Oliver, "Fractional Horse Power Motor and Its Impact on Canadian Society and Culture," Material History Review 43 spring 1996 Pages: 55-67. Also Harry Jerome, 1934, "Mechanization in Industry. NY: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1934, pp 174-175]
Much less evident in the literature are the results of research into the implications of specific, small and unobtrusive technologies, especially those that enter the home (often by the back door). Oliver's point is that the appearance fractional horse power electric motor set in motion a series of changes in living that had a major impact upon behavior, values, and the like, but these shifts occurred without the responsibility being recognized [change phrasing], Further, Oliver adds,
There is little to help us to understand better what the[se technologies] are, what they do, how they work and their intended, unintended, as well as their unanticipated and unplanned for consequences - those now increasingly evident as the twentieth century draws to a close.
