
His father installed printing presses – he dismantles them - smacktoward
https://www.cjr.org/united_states_project/printing-press-joel-birket-tennessean-nytimes.php
======
killjoywashere
There's a whole class of these occupations that are in a sense foundational to
modern society yet are going extinct. Scientific glassblowing is another that
comes to mind: [https://www.latimes.com/local/education/la-me-caltech-
glassb...](https://www.latimes.com/local/education/la-me-caltech-
glassblower-20160613-snap-story.html)

I kind of wonder to what degree this is a failure of national planning vs a
natural cycle of technical skills. Does anyone still mourn the plasterers and
stonemasons that made so many decorative building flourishes before the
modernists took over with their "clean lines" and "reduced labor costs"?

~~~
Fomite
I read an article, I think on here, a few years ago talking about the reason
brick buildings look so ugly so fast now is essentially that skilled
bricklayers are no longer a thing.

~~~
Spooky23
That’s also a brick thing. After WW2, bricks were needed in vast quantities
for various public works, and the quantities of cheap brick shifted production
to the south. That basically put the whole rest of the business out of
business.

~~~
NeedMoreTea
Don't know about in the US, but here in the UK engineering brick mostly died
out after WW2.

Pre-war lots of commercial buildings and housing were built with engineering
brick. Iron hard and usually with a shiny face that's more like china. They
were mostly impervious to water - enough to also be used as damp proofing -
and chemical ingress. Only really used to restore and for a few industrial
applications now.

Regular bricks can be damaged by frost, salt and pollutants surprisingly
easily.

~~~
peterclary
Did a building conservation course a few years back which covered damp proof
courses and engineering bricks, showing pictures of how people had had to
allow insurance company-approved damp-proof “experts” to drill a cavity into
the face of each engineering brick, inject some treatment, and then seal it
off. Ugly, expensive, and totally unnecessary.

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spectramax
I didn't know I can get so emotional about printing presses until I watched
"Farewell - ETAOIN SHRDLU" documentary. It is about the last NYTimes newspaper
run on these magnificent machines.

[https://vimeo.com/127605643](https://vimeo.com/127605643)

~~~
neilv
Boston Globe's:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tuImfDYWvck](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tuImfDYWvck)

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turndown
Stories like these are always sad to me, but in the end I remember that stuff
like this is totally natural and part of the act of invention. We simply found
a better way of communicating information, and the printing press will never
be able to compete with it in terms of information density, convenience,
etc...

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mrosett
On a different note, it’s oddly refreshing that the “dismantles” in the
headline is literal and not attached to a video of someone yelling at
political opponents.

