Blessed are the Toolmakers

Column by Craig Ceely - Feb 19, 2004

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Think about the tools you know how to use. Do you know their inventors? I don’t know who crafted the first club or hammer, or lit the first fire, and I couldn’t put a name to the inventor of the awl or the saw.

And that’s a shame, because a tool is created only when an individual exercises imagination and acts on that imagination. Tools allow us to accomplish things which might otherwise be unimaginable, and to imagine further things we could accomplish. We owe the toolmakers a lot, and too many of them are uncelebrated today.

On the other hand, one such toolmaker, Tim Berners-Lee, was selected for a knighthood recently. Berners-Lee’s achievement is that, while working at the CERN particle physics lab in Switzerland, he designed and wrote the World Wide Web in his spare time.

Berners-Lee is widely celebrated for giving his invention away, but that’s not what impresses me. What does impress me is that he did it, and has thus enabled millions upon millions to accomplish the previously unimaginable.

The Web truly is a tool. The American Heritage Dictionary defines “tool” thusly: “Anything used in the performance of an operation”; “Anything regarded as necessary to the carrying out of one’s occupation or profession”; “One that is manipulated or used by another.”

And use the Web we have. Every day we purchase books, vitamins, vibrators, clothing, toys — even stocks and bonds and life insurance — online. We read billions of web sites and blogs, commercial and noncommercial, none of which would have existed in their present form without the original thinking and effort of Tim Berners-Lee.

Of course, hammers and screwdrivers are tools, too (not that all of us use them properly), but like the World Wide Web, a good tool needn’t be so concrete. Or concrete at all. The important thing is that once its principles have been learned, a tool is available for uses limited only by the user’s imagination.

Fra Luca Pacioli devised a tool which is now used by individuals and organizations all over the world. In retrospect, it’s easy to see why his double-entry bookkeeping is so universal: as with any good tool, once you learn to use it, it’s available for tasks that its inventor probably never imagined. Users of Pacioli’s accounting methods keep track of cash, credit, equipment, and even bears in national parks. You, the user, needn’t devise different methods for different projects: Pacioli has made that unnecessary.

Perhaps not all of us are brilliant — or ethical — accountants, but Pacioli surely is not to be blamed for the Enron and WorldCom debacles. And anyway, competent merchants and traders adopted his methods in the sixteenth century, which means that, having helped modern capitalism come into being, he deserves part of the credit for the high standards of living enjoyed by the western world today.

Now, you can always find someone who’ll be bored by carpenter’s tools or by automotive tools, or even by accounting. Consider, though, that by the definitions offered above, it would be reasonable to describe the cello as a tool used by Yo-Yo Ma, the guitar as a tool used by Andres Segovia, and the piano as a tool used by Vladimir Horowitz.

Furthermore, if we think to ask how these artists came by their skills as musicians, we encounter another toolmaker: Guido of Arezzo. Around 1025 A.D. he devised the modern system of musical notation: that is, representing pitches by their position on a horizontal staff.

Previous attempts at such systems existed, but none as flexible, as powerful, or as simple as Guido’s. His system impressed the leaders of the Catholic Church, and because of that it became widely adopted. So fertile was this system, though, that composers such as Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven each used an evolved form of it to brilliant and original effect hundreds of years after Guido’s death.

Consider also that the grandchildren of anyone who ever saw these musical artists perform are all long dead. Yet we can revere and enjoy their music today, because we have it — in notated form. Long before the invention of sound recording, composers were able to put their ideas to paper and make them available not only to their contemporaries, but to future performers, teachers, conductors, and other composers — thanks to Guido of Arezzo.

Children learn to read music every day, and because they do, they too can play Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven. These composers are part of our cultural heritage because Guido of Arezzo had an imagination, and crafted a tool.

Sometimes a tool is devised in order to eliminate a problem, and Aldus Manutius the Elder certainly had a problem. Aldus was a printer in fifteenth-century Venice, and in his day, books were difficult to read. There was no generally accepted system of punctuation in Europe, and as you might recall from museum trips, authors of ancient and medieval Latin tended to run all of their words together on a page. With the invention of movable type and the newly-created industries of printing and publishing, standardization of punctuation was needed. Enter Aldus Manutius.

Aldus was instrumental in standardizing punctuation. He invented the modern comma and the semicolon, created the italic typeface, and began putting periods at the ends of sentences. Your reading experience today is what it is because of Aldus Manutius.

The tools of Fra Luca Pacioli, Guido of Arezzo, and Aldus Manutius the Elder are all found on the World Wide Web, that creation of Tim Berners-Lee. Double-entry bookkeeping is used by online companies large and small, music files that wouldn’t exist without musical notation abound, and we make sense of the texts we encounter by means of interpreting marks of punctuation.

Me? I’ll still use a screwdriver as a hammer, though it causes skilled craftsmen to cringe — and no one trusts me with power tools (nor should they). But I respect tools, especially the ones I know how to use. Aldus Manutius has given me one that I use in my professional life, so to that extent I owe my livelihood to him.

There are many aircraft designers at work today, but I’m not one of them, and even if a perfectly-designed aircraft were put in my hands, I wouldn’t know how to fly it. But I’ve used some sixty of the world’s airports, and over twenty different types of aircraft, for business and for pleasure. I listen to Bach and I play him (poorly) on the guitar. I read and write, for work and for pleasure, every day. I benefit from the efforts of toolmakers both living and long dead.

And as for Tim Berners-Lee and his knighthood? Congratulations, Sir Tim. Thanks for the World Wide Web: I hope you take great pride in having created it, and I’m glad you’ve chosen to live and work in the United States. I’m looking forward to your next hammer.