Uwe Hollerbach
uwe@hollerbach.org

>You, as a master metalsmith would have had an entire "back room" filled with >apprentices...
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>Now, let's transport ourselves back to the present day:
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>Lee

Yes, it really is amazing what powered machinery has put at our disposal; that's a thing we often lose sight of. I was at the gym the other day, working out on the treadmill, and it occurred to me to muse about the numbers that were going by (this treadmill is a modern hi-tech one that reports all sorts of things). One number was "calories burned per minute", and at that point it was around 15 cal/min or so. Assuming that's accurate, that means about 60 kJ/min¹ or about 1 kJ/sec -- which is 1 kilowatt (which is actually pretty good, a bit better than 1 horsepower; but I was sweating like a horse, too!). I was going for about an hour, though not quite all at that pace, so I produced roughly one kilowatt-hour... Now, if you look on your average utility bill, you'll find that the price of one kilowatt-hour is around a dime, give or take a factor of two. Ten cents, is all. I don't know how much power the V&F press uses, on average, but I do know that Anne's big kiln, for example, sucks about 5 kW. So that's equivalent to five big burly six-foot hamsters running in a very big wheel, sweating up a storm, so that she can do some enameling. We don't often stop to think of it in those terms anymore, but effectively we do still have that back room full of apprentices; except we don't have to feed them, and they're indentured for life, muahahahaha! :-)

¹ If you look up the conversion from calories to joules, you'll find that one calorie is a bit more than 4 joules -- so I've cheated you by a factor of a thousand! However, the truth of the matter is that it is not I but the food/nutrition industry that has cheated you by that factor. Since you poor americans apparently can't handle the metric system², the f/n industry has decreed that "1 Calorie" as reported on a candybar wrapper shall be equal to 1 kilocalorie as reported in (say) an organic chemist's report on the energy content of that candybar. Elsewhere in the world, when the energy content of food is reported, it's given in kcal.

² WHAP! Ok, I'll stop editorializing now!