Photo: newlyplantedOur family recently camped for a week in a nearby state forest where our most trusted item was a cast-iron frying pan. Its thickness distributes heat evenly. Nothing can harm it. The wrong kind of spatula won’t scratch some special non-stick coating.With simple care, it will last for a thousand years. Which reminded me how rare that combination of high quality and durability is today.
Most everything else I own is junk and seems to be designed that way. Here are several anecdotal examples:
In the old days, most Americans rented phones from the phone company (“Ma Bell”). My parents still own one, now over 30 years old, that survived raising three boys. These phones lasted forever. Meanwhile, Ma Bell was broken up in the 1980s. One engineer who worked for the phone company before and after the breakup told me of how the engineers were gathered together and given new ground rules: “It was all well and good in the old days to make phones with gold-plated contacts. But now it’s different. Here’s how to make the newer phones…” I think back on this comment as I watch one phone after another die, often after a few months.
I once helped my uncle select a new laser printer for his small business. The printer was a Laserjet 5 made by Hewlett-Packard. That was 15 years ago; the printer still works beautifully. It is made of metal and feels robust. In contrast, current printers, whether from HP or anyone else, feel like plastic junk. Whenever I open a compartment on my current printer, I worry that I will snap off a piece of the case and break it beyond repair.
Many iPhone models cannot have their battery replaced.
My less anecdotal example is textbooks. A standard introductory college physics textbook is Young and Freedman’s University Physics. Why is it in its 12th edition? In the 55 years since it was first published, has introductory college physics changed so significantly and so frequently? Hardly. Almost every idea taught in introductory physics has remained unchanged since the 1930s when quantum mechanics was developed. Indeed, the masterwork in this genre, Feynman’s famous Lectures on Physics was published in 1964 and is still mostly in its original form (there are two newer editions incorporating corrections provided by readers worldwide).
The reason for the 12 editions of Young and Freedman’s University Physics, as for most textbooks today, is planned obsolescence. Textbook publication contracts usually have a clause roughly along the following lines:
You agree to revise the book upon written request from us (the publisher). If you do not agree, we may select an author and pay them from your royalties. The payment will not exceed 25 percent of the royalties for the first revision, 50 percent for the second revision, and 75 for the third revision (and all the royalties for fourth and subsequent revisions).
The original author may be unwilling to do a revision, either because he or she has died or otherwise has no time. The publisher invites another author to make the revision, and voila, a new edition with a longer author list is created.
Best of all, the new edition is not available on the used-book market! Therein lies the publisher’s reason for the new edition: to force students to buy a new book rather than to “recycle” by buying a used copy. Often the newer edition will be nearly identical to the previous edition, except for reordering and renumbering the end-of-chapter problems. Therefore, homework assignments with lists of problems based on one edition cannot be used for a different edition. Conscientious professors will provide multiple problem numbers based on edition. However, after a few editions even the most conscientious will give up tracking the changes and simply require students to buy the current edition.
This deliberate generation of waste might have amazed and shocked our scholarly colleagues from medieval times. In medieval England, a book cost about $10,000 (in 2011 dollars) [H. E. Bell, The Price of Books in Medieval England, Library s4-XVII (3):312-332 (1936)]. This cost makes sense: Copying a book by hand might take a skilled workman about half a year. That one day books would be so cheap and publishers’ profit so important that people would design books to be thrown out—this would simply have been incomprehensible.
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“The original author may be unwilling to do a revision, either because he or she has died”
Well that sounds like a very good reason to me.
“The original author may be unwilling to do a revision, either because he or she has died”
Well that sounds like a very good reason to me.
How about FORCED obsolescence, as with a dud “smart” phone called the Intercept that was branded by one of the “big three,” and sold last year along with a 2-year contract? Look on the web, you’ll find nothing but stories about how it consistently failed over a huge range of customers and customer types, and about how, over the past year, the same company has consistently refused to allow its duped customers to replace this phone with any other model — i.e., a model that might actually work!
But let’s not regulate anything, because it would be too heavy a burden for the selfless heroes of corporate America!
In the old days men were men and shaved with cut-throat razors. Those things lasted for a long time, forever in fact with careful handling. Then King Gillette invented the disposable blue blade and waste was born. People though were just not culturally attuned to throwing away what appeared to be a perfectly good razor blade. There had to be some way to make these things last forever, or at least longer than the King would lead you to believe was appropriate. And so an after market industry was born, inventing and selling machines, that is machines, in the plural, that would sharpen disposable blades. Some of these machines were complex, some very simple. But the point of all of them was the same, to make something disposable last a long, long time.
University professors don’t have the option of using last year’s edition text book because the publisher is no longer printing it, and the professor can’t require students to buy a book that isn’t in print and that they may not be able to find. Publishers do this on purpose, and do it to battle the loss of revenue for them that is the used book market; new edition every year, and professors required to use the new edition because students can’t buy the old (i.e., out of print) edition. It’s a racket, and it’s very deliberate. Professors hate it as much as students do, but can’t do anything about it if they are using textbooks.
I have a full set of cast iron frying pans plus a cast iron dutch oven, all are over 50 years old and some are close to 100. Many were used by my grand mother. I use them frequently and they are in perfect condition. My only objection to them is that they don’t come with tight fitting lids.
I used to sell electronic equipment a big box store. I would talk with the customers about the stuff they already had and compare it to what we were selling at the store. In the 2 years I worked there, home theater systems went from 4-channel surround sound to 5.1 and a few years later 7.1. TV’s went from CRT to LCD and plasma. The LCD and Plasma TVs were several thousand dollars. HD TVs and 16:9 TV’s were just coming out and very expensive. Someone that spent $5,000.00 dollars on equipment 10 years ago can get better equipment now for under $2,000.00. As technology progresses, the older equipment becomes out of date. That’s why everything has a planned obsolescence.
The items you can pick up now probably won’t be compatible with the technology in 5-10 years. Why would you design something that last 20 years and is only usable for the next 10? My first computer cost over $2,000.00. My newest computer cost under $600.00. The new computer is 1000’s of times faster and better than my first one. The new computer is already obsolete. I’ll use it until it breaks, then I’ll buy a new one and live with the knowledge that I have a better computer.
I also found that a lot of my customers were replacing stereo systems from 20-30 years ago. Many of them claimed that the new stuff we had cost the same amount as it did last time they bought a new stereo. Without taking an exact inflation figure into account, $1,000 in the 1970’s was about 3-4 weeks of my father’s salary. Now, $1,000.00 is a few days salary. If my father spent the same 3-4 weeks’ salary on a new system, he would have the best sound system in the neighborhood and it would last a LONG time. He will have one of the best 7.1 surround sound systems available. The question is, why would he spend that much? My parents bought a new TV. They upgraded from an HD CRT to an HD LCD. The new TV needs adapters to hook up their 2 TiVo (3-years old) and DVD-player (not blu-ray). If they spent several thousand dollars on the old TV, it might still work. However, they wouldn’t be able to hook up the new technology.
The final question we all need to ask is this: Do we want something that costs a lot of money (say $10,000+) and will last for many years(30+) but, we won’t be able to use it in the future due to it being old technology? Another way of looking at it, would you trade in your smart phones for the cell-phones from the early 80’s that required you to carry a battery in a backpack? No, you wouldn’t. Do those old phones even work on today’s cell towers? I doubt it.
You can buy phones and other equipment that will last for a long time. The big question is why would you want to?
While I agree 100% with your sentiments, you are wrong about cast iron on both counts when you write “Its thickness distributes heat evenly. Nothing can harm it.”
First off, it distributes heat very poorly. Don’t believe me, put it on a red-hot stovetop and touch the side at the top; it will be cool for several minutes. Cast iron has a lot of mass for its size (eg. its heavy) and so when you plot a steak or something on it the pan does not cool to quickly. But hopefully you are allowing the pan to preheat for many minutes before using it because it takes a long time for the temperature of all parts to rise (eg. heat distributes slowly and is uneven).
Second, as to “nothing can harm it” go to your sink, turn it on, and observe what comes out. That stuff, water, will destroy your cast iron pan. Thats why they need seasoning, why they need to be carefully dried and lightly oiled after each washing.