Dovetail Joints - new techniques for new technologies How do you cross a river? Well you can ford it if there is a shallow enough place but if there isn't, your only option is to build a bridge. Bridge building goes back thousands of years and changed remarkably little until the middle of the eighteenth century. The way you did it was to use either arches or spans. Arches are constructed using stones or bricks but to span longer distances you need a material which is long. For most of man's history the only long material that existed was wood and the way you join two pieces of wood together is by making a joint. The best known, and most beautiful, joint is the dovetail joint. In the mid 1700's the industrial revolution began to take its first faltering steps when man discovered how to make iron in large quantities. Prior to this iron ore was heated over a fire and you only got small lumps. Suddenly, it was possible to pour iron into moulds and make it into long lengths. So for the first time in mankind's history it was possible to build a bridge using iron and it happened in Shropshire, birthplace of the Industrial Revolution. The town is still called Ironbridge and the bridge is still there as you can see in the picture. But the early builders faced a problem - how do you join long lengths of iron together? Until that time iron had been worked by beating it on an anvil. No-one had ever had to join long lengths of iron together on this scale. So they did what users of all new technologies do? They used a traditional method to join a new material. They actually cast dovetail joints and pegged them with iron pegs! It sounds crazy now but to them it was the most logical thing in the world. They were at the white heat of technological innovation and they were doing new things with a new material. They used it for a familiar task and it did it better. They used iron in place of wood and it was better (it was stronger). Nobody at that time could conceive of the rivet or the idea of welding metal together. Doesn't this ring a bell? Isn't this exactly what we are doing with computers? We use the new technology to do traditional things - only better. For example, a word processor is better than a pen - but we are doing the same thing with it. A desktop publisher brings the power of the print shop to your desktop - but it is nothing new! I believe that almost everything we have done so far with computers is nothing more than using new technology to do traditional tasks - but better. It is faster and more flexible. It improves the way you work - for instance you can edit your text as you go along, but we are essentially doing the same old things. We are using dovetail joints. What will be the first rivet? What will be the first example of welding in our new world? I think the Internet is the first example of a rivet. It is doing something totally new - it is something that could not exist using old technologies. Electronic publishing and e-commerce are perhaps the next examples? What do you think? And what effect will they have on the world? This is even harder to imagine because it is not possible for our brain to make that great a leap. Those people who built the Iron Bridge would not have been able to conceive of manned flight, package holidays, the magazine industry, education for all, or even giving the working man the vote! What are the things we cannot imagine but which our children will take for granted?