Tool Morality

TDC

Tool morality

Kevin Cameron

TOOLS DISAPPEAR. IN AN IDEAL WORLD, populated by conscious, thinking, moral beings, they ought not to. That’s why we have lockable toolboxes, too heavy to steal. That’s why shops have tool cribs, sign-out sheets and vigilant tool superintendents. It gets worse with time, too. The Snap-On wrench that was eight dollars once is now the price of a good dinner. It hurts when it disappears. It hurts again when I see it in someone else’s hand, years later, at some faraway race.

I’m guilty, too. I have a Craftsman open-end wrench marked FRC; former rider Frank R. Camillieri has never come to get it. Does he curse me whenever he needs a 17mm? And where is my long Philips, the one I bought especially to loosen carb-manifold screws on my H2R? I must assume that criminal fingers crept, in stealth, into my second drawer and made off with it.

During college, I discovered the company of educated persons-and their romantic illusions about human nature. Not for them the prison walls of personal property. In every university machine shop you will see curiously decorated walls, covered with the painted outlines of tools, with hooks as if to hold real objects. But there are never any tools in the outlines-nothing except for sizes that fit nothing, like 15/32 or 16mm, which are, perversely, always there. These decorated walls are not some kind of utilitarian art, they are the remnants of a failed social experiment. In each case, someone assumed that the shop would be used only by the above-mentioned conscious, thinking, moral beings. That someone then bought a thousand dollars worth of hand tools and carefully outlined each one in black on a board, then hung it in place for the use of everyone. Often each tool bore a paint code as well-pink for the physics machine shop, bilious green for the vacuum shop, and so on. After receiving all this care, the useful tools departed immediately and forever, leaving only their outlines.

There is, of course, the ancient Eskimo way with tools. If, as I am passing Tuktu-nerkte’s summerhouse, I see a fat caribou, I know that he will understand if I borrow his bow and his arrow to make sure that we all eat meat tonight. But that can’t explain why my threesided knife was in someone else’s toolbox. When I grilled the perp, he confessed his crime; he saw, he wanted and he took. The same thing happens with books. Where is my copy of Ower’s The Measurement of Airflow? Where is my 1953 edition of Ricardo, with the wonderful fold-out engineering drawings of the great aircraft engines? Gone the same way my screwdriver and machinist’s knife went-in the hand of some non-conscious, non-thinking, non-moral being.

Someone like myself. After all, where did I get my copy of Vulcanization of Elastomers?

Unfortunately, morality in our country is colored by television police drama. Right, wrong, good guys, bad guys. Simple concepts like this fit the messy real world poorly, and are hard to live with. To escape our little guilts, we could use the politicians’ way: Call it something else. If, as the Utopians say, property is theft, then theft becomes liberation. What a relief. My 17mm open-end isn’t stolen, it’s liberated. And, if you believe that, war is peace and truth is lies, as well.

In our era of enlightenment, the most trusted escape hatch out of moral dilemmas is the one marked “science.” In the name of the end of ideology or of something called “objectivity,” science is called upon to take the rap for many human failings. A major experiment of this kind was performed in a shop where I once worked. This shop had the usual toolboard behind the bench area, decorated with the usual empty images of wrenches, pliers and screwdrivers-of which there were, naturally, none at all. On the opposite side of the shop was the sign-out cabinet, containing the more valuable power tools, and a sheet on which the user might note the tool taken, and the date. The cabinet was open and empty, and the most recent date on the sheet was from years before.

We had noticed that the tool disappearance rate was especially high in the spring, when the higher leadership of the company put their boats in the water. This suggested a theory: that people take tools for a specific, real need, and perhaps do not take them otherwise. One of us devised an experiment. Going to the industrial hardware store, he bought a gross (144) of the cheapest screwdrivers, and put out six of them on the tool board. In four days they were all gone. He put out six more, and when those were gone, six again, and so on. His theory was that each employee had a need for a screwdriver in the car, one in the kitchen, one on the boat, and so on. Once these needs were filled, he reasoned, there should be a drop in the rate of screwdriver disappearance.

I regret to inform you that no such drop in rate was ever discovered, and all 144 screwdrivers disappeared inside of a few weeks. Does this prove the base nature of the human soul? Shall we tut-tut at such disrespect of property? No need for any of that preachy stuff. A simple scientific principle absolves all human guilt in this matter: Diffusion. If we divide a vessel with a membrane, and put pure water on one side of the membrane, salt water on the other, the salt will diffuse through the membrane until the salt concentrations on the two sides are equal. There is no morality here-just a morally colorless physical phenomenon: Diffusion. In the screwdriver experiment-and in all situations in which tools are made freely available-there is a higher concentration of tools in the shop or open box than there is elsewhere, so naturally those tools flow outward until the concentration is the same everywhere. The more tools you put in the shop, the faster they will diffuse away-exactly like the salt moving across the membrane. Ù