JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1268

When I look at something like this–an advertisement for a company that produced precision instruments–I think instantly of industry, automation, Dada and Duchamp, who along with Cubists and Precisionist and Futurists whobrought out the extreme beauty of industrial, technical, instrumental form.  At the same time its probably possible to unthink Engels and Marx who thought that the new coming art form of Communism would be purely functional, to be used in design and implementation only.  And I’m not talking about the way that the Victorians added their Victorian crowns and laces and altars in the design of machines and machine parts, worshiping as they did at the shrine of tech science.  Marx and Engels had something different in mind, a non-art of simple, employable, straightforward applied design.

This ad is just beautiful.

Which is a detail from this image (available from our blog bookstore, here):

Ball bearings are exceptionally important and have a long history, I mean, long stretching back more than 2000 years (in its most primitive form), finding formative articulation in the Renaissance, and then their first patent in 1869–long and off the point for right now, just long and a little complicated.  I just want to say–I find this image to be quite lovely.