Hammers - daverupert.com
I bet if you were someone who could make a hammer that would have been a good stable job for years, centuries even. Almost everyone needs a hammer at some point in their life.
Then some guy, Greg, would see how busy the hammersmith is making hammers one at-a-time and say, “I’m going to make hammers one hundred at a time!” He’d pay Bartholomew not to make him one hammer, but to make a mold that could make one hundred hammers at a time. Greg has rich parents, he can afford this sort of risky business venture. One hundred hammers for the price of ten, that’s profit.
After the hammer mold, Bartholomew would still get paid. No one actually likes pouring molten iron and hammering, but Bartholomew doesn’t mind. He’s making less money per hammer, but he’s also producing more hammers with a lot less effort, so it nets out okay. The job is less interesting – making hammers and nothing else – but he didn’t like being a salesman and dealing with wayward customer requests anyways. There’s lots of money in churning out hammers this way, it’s more efficient and people like Greg love selling them and making money. Bartholomew buys himself a new ox cart.
Then some other guy, Jeff, seeing all those hammers and all that money, would say “I’m going to make a machine that makes a million hammers a day.” Jeff knows a regional lord who is friends with the king and has big treasure chests. He’d hire Bartholomew and his hammersmith friends to build a giant complex machine with whistles and gauges and a furnace that makes ten hammers a second. A million hammers a day for the price of a thousand hammers, now that’s profit!
